Samir Haddad

Samir Haddad is a navigation machine-learning engineer at the Toulouse campus. He trained the optical navigation models that let the Valkyrie Survey Corvette and Corvid Stealth Scout fix their position from star fields and moon silhouettes without any radio beacons.

Samir maintains Halcyon's open-source star-catalogue tooling and is a regular speaker at hackathons, where he encourages students to build on Halcyon's open navigation datasets.

Samir joined Halcyon after a doctorate in computer vision and still spends his weekends photographing the night sky. His current project is a lightweight navigation model that can run on the modest flight computer of the Sparrow Trainer, so that student pilots learn optical navigation from their very first flight. He also mentors interns from the Toulouse campus.