Things I've Done
SPARC '26
Selected for SPARC '26.
3% acceptance rate.
Contract Work
Under contract building machines for fire tech companies. Manufacturing fireballs
wrdn
Building wrdn, an AI accountability system for your life. It watches your day through ambient audio and visual context, builds a long-term model of your goals and values, and tells you when you're drifting from what actually matters to you.
It helps you make decisions according to the context spanning your life, and proactively executes commands through personal agents.
I build the stack from kernels to hardware.
STRATUS UAV: Optimizing Prescribed Burning using UAVs and Predictive Modeling
Led development of patent-pending autonomous UAV to mitigate wildfire spread. From scratch, 3D-printed a VTOL aircraft designed to conduct autonomous backburning, achieving 15 km range with 1.2 hour endurance, solving the biggest issues in the field:
I built in 7 months what they built in 9 years.
- Cost: around $16k/day for helicopters, custom built helicopters, and pilots
- Safety: pilot liability
- Lower price: by 5x
- Higher range: by a factor of 3x over the closest drone competitor
SBON (Strategic-Blackline-Optimization-Engine)
Built a wildfire prediction foundational model that broke SOTA and created the first ML approach to optimizing prescribed burns.
SBON uses a tri-branch multimodal architecture over 13 input modalities spanning fire imagery, weather, and geography, with ConvNeXt and SSMs as encoders, feeding into a larger SSM to create a 4-hour fire-mask prediction.
We treat the wildfire foundational model as an environment, where we autoregressively rollout to 48 hours to get a longer scale prediction. We then use PPO to optimize the placement of prescribed burns, turning a workflow still driven largely by checklists and operator intuition into an optimization problem.
No Circles
Built no-circles.com, a website-first personalized daily newsletter that learns from what each reader actually responds to.
The system keeps a memory of the user, builds a brief from that memory, and updates future issues from replies and feedback to help teach the person about tangential fields they know little about. Scaled to triple-digit users 3 weeks from inception
Science fair results
Placed 2nd in the California State Science Fair, 1st @ regionals and won 5 awards building PHOENIX UAV for early wildfire detection:
1st in category, 1st in fair, Henkel aerospace award, 1 of 3 selected for national competition, 1 out of 200 nationally winning Junior Lemelson-MIT Inventor Award, and 1 of 20 selected for state level competition.
Competitions
Competed in various competitive programming and physics competitions, ultimately developing skills achieving USACO Gold and qualifying scores on the F=MA exam, which is top 5% nationally.
I also competed in CALICO, Harker Physics Invitational, Harker Programming Invitational, and held a top 30 placement in the nation in MSPF Debate, reaching elimination rounds in national-circuit tournaments like Stanford and TOC.
Self-study
Independently studied mathematics from high school precalculus to multivariable calculus and linear algebra, as well as ML and transformer theory, in under a year.
A lot of that came from wanting to compress ideas until they felt intuitive instead of merely familiar.