He currently serves as distinguished scientist at Apple Inc. His main areas of research are artificial intelligence, computer vision, machine learning, and pattern recognition.
He continued his studies at the university, and finished his PhD with honors in computer science in 2002 with a thesis, Arrangements in four dimensions and related structures; his doctoral adviser was Micha Sharir.
[13][14] He then completed his postdoctoral fellowship under the supervision of Christos Papadimitriou at the University of California, Berkeley, where he conducted research in theoretical computer science in 2002–2005.
[21][8][22] The studies in the domain of urban autonomous driving led Koltun's group to the development of the Car Learning to Act (CARLA) project in 2017.
[27] The software consists of the Arduino Nano board, which bridges the smartphone with the motor actuation tasks and batteries, and an Android app responsible for the integration of data.
[31][32][33] Koltun co-authored a research that developed Swift, an autonomous drone system using onboard sensors that can match the performance of human world champions.
[34] Koltun has expressed concerns regarding the h-index's reliability, highlighting the inflation of its values due to the prevalence of multiple co-authorships in scientific communities.