About

I’m Justin D. Norman, an ML/AI Research Engineer at UC Berkeley researching computer vision and machine learning under Hany Farid, Mike Rivera, and Alex Hughes. My doctoral work focuses on deepfake detection, content authenticity, and LLM hallucination detection and mitigation. I’m a recipient of the Marcus Foster Fellowship and the FASPE Design & Technology Fellowship.

Before returning to research, I spent over a decade building and leading ML/AI teams in industry. Most recently I served as CTO and Head of AI at Vera AI, where I led both the engineering organization and the AI research program. Prior to that I was VP of Data Science, Analytics and Data Products at Yelp, Director of Research at Cloudera Fast Forward Labs, Head of Applied Machine Learning at Fitbit, and Chief Data Scientist at Cisco. I’m also the author of Product Management for AI (O’Reilly). Before tech, I served as a Marine Corps officer with a focus in systems analytics and intelligence.

I hold an MBA with a concentration in Business Analytics from USC, a BS in Computer Science from the United States Naval Academy, and am completing my PhD at UC Berkeley.

What to expect here

This blog covers the intersection of ML/AI engineering, applied research, and the tech industry. I write about building real systems: model architectures, training pipelines, deployment patterns, and the practical decisions that textbooks skip. Topics range from deep learning and time series forecasting to MLOps, computer vision, and lessons from shipping ML products at scale.

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