I solve real world problems with machine learning.
Currently
High Performance Computing (HPC) Engineer for AI and Data
Rescale – HPC Built for Cloud
May 2025 – Present
Building the ChatGPT of physics simulations (i.e. Physics transformers, not LLMs).
Previously
View my resume here, or keep scrolling.
Research Software Engineer
National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)
May 2023 – May 2025
Check out my app, now in production at Illinois: chat.illinois.edu
I generated $2 million in revenue in 12 months via authored NSF grants & industry contracts by selling customizations to my open source application chat.illinois.edu. I shipped production apps to thousands of users.
I build apps that combine React, Transformers, PyTorch, and 10+ years of daily Linux expertise. I’m a Linux sys-admin meets AI PhD combined with a react full stack shipper.
Graduate Research Assistant
National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)
Oct 2021 – May 2023
Funded by the NSF & IBM Research.
I implemented distributed ML training on a GPU supercomputer (25 Nvidia DGX nodes, 200 A100 GPUs) to scale up the research of domain experts in biology and physics.
Software Engineer Internship
IBM Research
May – Aug 2022
AI Foundation Model training, dataflow optimization. Based in historic Yorktown, NY.
Machine Learning R&D Intern
Palladyne AI – Advanced exoskeletons
Built machine learning vision segmentation models running on edge computers (Nvidia Jetson on-robot) including sensor fusion with depth sensing cameras to understand 3D scenes in pixel-per-pixel segmentation, at 100+ FPS, for highly accurate robot planning.
When I worked there it was called “Sarcos Robotics” and they built the most advanced human exoskeleton full-experience hardware, for industrial applications and military bases.
Cofounder of Crescent Health (acquired by BetterUp)
3x NASA Software Intern for Autonomous Systems
Focused on OpenCV, 3D point clouds (RGB-D), and parallel computing at Nasa’s Autonomy Incubator.
Education
MS in CS from UIUC (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Specialization in applied machine learning, ML-ops, and distributed ML training.
Tools for Thought
🧠 Neural networks ignoring training data: the astonishing power of Attention
Learning means forming a compact representation of a concept and forgetting enables greater information density.
📚 Designing Better Books
What is the future of books? How can we make learning cheaper and easier by design? Like with a mnemonic medium? How can I build on the best examples on the internet today?
🛠 My best tools as a high-performance knowledge worker
Pianists at every level drill scales so they can think in higher abstractions while they play. But no knowledge worker I know deliberately practices their craft. I’m hoping to bridge this gap, to craft a nice workspace, to leave more mental space free to invent new ideas.
Come look at the “tech stack” behind my creative process.
AI Research
🥇 How We Won Argonne Labs’ AI-Hackathon
Novel AI for Material Science Problems
🐳 Docker Slim – smaller docker images without tinkering
🧠 What AI algorithms win in the real world?
A Theoretical Analysis of the Algorithms that Win Kaggle Competitions
😏 Unsupervised Facial Recognition: an Extension to InfoGAN Generative Adversarial Networks
📰 Fake News Detection innovation using “Stance” (e.g. agree/disagree text corpus classification)
⌚ Using Wearables for Sleep Improvement: A Platform for Randomized Self-Experiments [Preprint]
The Good Thinking blog
💻 Making Windows Excellent (become a 10x computer user)
💡 Most enlightening places on the internet (for CS nerds)
🍎 Best Apps for iOS (from a life-long android fanboy)
🎓 Academic Publishing is a joke; here’s a better way to communicate science. Draft, please add your comments 🙂
My work
NASA In-Space Robotics Internships
Won HackMIT 2017 & 2018!
Climbing First Ascent using Custom UAVs
See the photo & video here!
NASA Media Highlights
Follow my twitter
Follow my twitter 🐣 for machine learning news & memes.
Personal Life
Kastan Day 