VP, AI @ Atoms.
Previously Senior Director and Distinguished Scientist, AI @ Meta.

I lead AI at Atoms, where I am building foundation models for the physical world: models that let machines understand, navigate, and operate in real environments rather than only in software.

For 8 years my job was making models small enough and fast enough to live on AI glasses. The physical world is a harder version of the same problem.

Before Atoms, I was Senior Director and Distinguished Scientist, AI at Meta Reality Labs, where I led an AI research and engineering organization building efficient on-device AI for mixed reality products, including AI glasses. That work spanned the full AI stack: algorithms, model architecture, optimization, and deployment. My research interests center on efficient AI, particularly multimodal models, generative AI, on-device LLMs, and vision-language models.

Before joining Meta in 2018, I was Director of Applied Machine Learning at Arm Research, where my team helped pioneer TinyML, enabling AI to run on small, resource-constrained devices.

I earned my Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and have served as visiting scholar (2011-2014) and visiting faculty (2016-2017) at Stanford. I've authored 200+ research papers and am an inventor on 40+ patents.

I received the ACM-SIGDA Technical Leadership Award in 2009 and was invited to the National Academy of Engineering's Frontiers of Engineering Symposium in 2017. In 2026, I received the Outstanding Alumni Award from Carnegie Mellon University's College of Engineering.

Contact me
vchandra@alumni.cmu.edu