For this experienced AV expert, immigrating to Pittsburgh was a no-brainer

This is How I Got Here, a series where we chart the career journeys of technologists. Want to tell your story? Get in touch.

Pittsburgh has made its mark as a hub for autonomous vehicle development, and technologists from all over the world are coming to be part of it. 

Ashton Fagg came to the US from Australia with ties to the scene at Carnegie Mellon University. Since immigrating, he’s bounced around from Uber’s AV department, to self-driving vehicle startup Aurora and map production tool Mach9. 

Along the way, he’s become a bit of an expert in the space.

“One of the things that I always try to do is to build the best quality stuff [because it] runs on a vehicle that’s driving down the road where potentially your friends and family could be driving,” Fagg told Technical.ly. “I’m not going to lie, that’s pretty stressful.”

Today, 32-year-old Fagg, who lives in Greenfield, works at computer vision consulting company AFWare as chief technologist, while also working on his own products he hopes to market and license in the future. 

The journey to get here, though, was dotted with challenges in the immigration process as he settled in Pittsburgh.

In this edition of Technical.ly’s How I Got Here series, Fagg discusses the mentor who brought him to Carnegie Mellon University, why moving to the US paid off and how creative endeavors outside of work. This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. 

How did your tech career begin?

Technology has always been an interest for me. My father works in a technical job, my grandfathers were both really handy at building stuff, and all sorts of things like that. 

Early on, it was more like mechanical stuff, rather than computers and such. Originally, what I wanted to do was just go and be like a sysadmin somewhere. But then I realized that what I really wanted to do was use computers to create things.

In 2011, I got an internship with CSIRO, which is a government research organization in Australia, that deeply turned me on to the idea of doing research.

I spent a bunch of time here at Pittsburgh, at Carnegie Mellon, working with my primary advisor, Simon Lucey [now associate research professor of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University].

What was the impetus for moving to the US?

It was happenstance that I ended up coming over here. I started my PhD in 2013 and Simon, who was at that time a research scientist at CSIRO, got an offer to be a professor at CMU.

I ended up coming over for nine months from the middle of 2016 to around April 2017 and never intended to get a job here. I interviewed for a couple of jobs, and I got offered a job.

What challenges did you face?

The system is fundamentally broken. I don’t think there’s much argument about that. The whole process was years long and very stressful. My heart goes out to people from countries where there is a giant backlog of green cards, for example, that get chewed up and spat out by that system. 

There were times during that process for us where we thought, is this even worth it? 

How did you decide it was worth the trouble?

I started at Uber Advanced Technologies Goups in 2017, going through the whole Australian access to a special work. There’s no lottery or anything like that, the initial process was pretty easy. 

Coming over and actually starting work was cool. The computer science scene, generally, more or less all the action, was here in the US. That was always in the back of my mind. So as the years went on, and I eventually ended up applying for and receiving a green card.

There was a lot of stress around that time, because, of course, it was the middle of a pandemic. What kind of kept me going there was I kept thinking about, well, the US is the place to be if you do this kind of work, there’s no question. There’s several big players, but the US is very big. 

The US feels like home now. I really can’t imagine being anywhere else, and I get opportunities here that I would not be otherwise able to.

What do you do outside of work?

I’m an amateur radio operator. I got licensed a couple years ago, and I’m slowly working through getting my next level of license and the next one after that

One of the other things I’ve just recently started doing I’m really excited about is a little bit of woodworking, but I’m also doing painting as well. So, I’m trying to channel some creative energy.