I solve real world problems with machine learning.

Swarthmore president Val Smith asked me to speak to incoming students at orientation 2019. View my talk on startups, failure and creating your own system of happiness.

Working at NASA’s Autonomy incubator, read about my work here.

Currently

Masters in Computer Science from UIUC
Specialization in applied machine learning.
Expected grad May, 2023.

National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)
Research Assistant, Oct 21-Present
Distributed Machine Learning Training

Research Assistant, Oct 2021-Present
Implemented distributed ML training on a GPU supercomputer, enabled by domain experts in biology and physics. Funded by the NSF.

Previously

Sarcos Robotics – Advanced exoskeletons
Machine Learning R&D Intern

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.

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Nvidia TensorRT & Jetson

Research Engineering

Transfer Learning / Fine tuning

AI Robotics

Previous cofounder of Bioloop Sleep
Jason Jin has built a great team since I left!

View my resume here.

Tools for Thought

🧠 Neural networks ignoring training data: the astonishing power of Attention

lots of gifs in this post 👀

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

🧠 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)

⌚ [A preprint] Using Wearables for Sleep Improvement: A Platform for Randomized Self-Experiments

The Good Thinking blog

💻 Making Windows Excellent (become a 10x computer user)

👩‍💻 Make CS your Hobby

💡 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 🙂

For HackMIT 2017, I owned the ML model construction for our fake news detection system. I’m happy with this extremely creative approach for utilizing stance detection and a dynamic reputation database to classify news.

My work

NASA In-Space Robotics Internships

I worked in NASA’s Autonomy Incubator working on the computer vision systems for the robotic assembly of large satellites or space stations while in orbit.

Won HackMIT 2017 & 2018!

See our AI journaling app! I developed creative novel AI text generation system.

Climbing First Ascent using Custom UAVs

My dad and I made the first ascent of the highest unclimbed peak in Colorado, using my custom built drones to set the ropes.
See the photo & video here!

NASA Media Highlights

Who's working on the future of In-Space Assembly? Some of the important work is being done by interns like Kastan Day at @NASA_Langley! Check out Kastan's video via the @AutonomyIncub8r here: https://t.co/RfLACh2Zvr pic.twitter.com/4V0WcIHTgS
— NASA Internships (@NASAInterns) August 10, 2018