Vetted Research Assistants in California

“Developed a production wildfire smoke detection system where smoke is visually subtle and easily confused with fog/clouds; addressed this with a hybrid CNN+LSTM+ViT model and multimodal weather features to reduce false positives. Experienced running scalable, reproducible ML pipelines on shared GPU infrastructure using Slurm and Kubernetes-style batch jobs with checkpointing, retries, and rigorous error analysis.”

“Internship experience building production-oriented AI systems, including a real-time voice scam/spoof detector (RawNet + AASIST) hardened for noisy audio via aggressive augmentation and Zoom-based noise simulation, evaluated with EER on clean and wild datasets. Also built an LLM-driven UI automation agent using Playwright for apps like Linear/Notion with modular tool design, unit tests, and replayable scripted scenarios, and has AWS Step Functions experience orchestrating Lambda/Cognito workflows.”

“UCLA RoMeLa research assistant (since Oct 2025) building an embedded control and sensor-data platform for multi-robot coordination in a simulated warehouse. Deep hands-on experience with ROS on NVIDIA Jetson under RTOS constraints, secure MQTT/TLS telemetry, and SLAM performance optimization (including ORB-SLAM3) validated in Gazebo and deployed via Docker/Kubernetes and CI/CD.”

“Robotics software engineer who built an end-to-end mobile manipulation platform (Franka Panda on a Clearpath Ridgeback) for a simulated-kitchen human-robot interaction study with natural speech commands, implemented in Python/ROS. Has hands-on experience integrating diverse sensors (RealSense, LiDAR, biosignals) with deep learning frameworks (PyTorch, Hugging Face) and fine-tuning GPT-Neo, plus simulation (Gazebo) and modern deployment practices (Docker/Kubernetes, CI/CD).”

“Interned at Rivian where they built and deployed a production Whisper-based ASR + LLM real-time event labeling pipeline to help autonomous-vehicle engineers diagnose failures and route issues to triage teams. Also built a stateful multi-agent "Code Partner" developer assistant using LangGraph/LangChain (planner/router/coder/critique/tester) with evaluation, adversarial testing, and stakeholder-friendly communication practices.”

“Software engineer who built and deployed OddPulse, a multi-agent LLM-powered continuous financial auditing system aimed at reducing compliance penalties by catching issues before audit cycles. Experienced with TrueAI-based agent orchestration, Airflow on GCP batch workflows, and rigorous evaluation/benchmarking (hit rate/MRR, latency/TTFT, cost) alongside security controls for sensitive financial data.”

“Head of Robotics at Orbital Composites who built the full ROS-based software stack ("OrbOS") for multi-robot KUKA-arm 3D printing of carbon-fiber composite geometries. Deep in motion planning and real-time control—created a pipeline to turn underconstrained toolpaths into optimal joint trajectories at massive command scale, plus redundant safety gatekeeping and a 250Hz synchronized robot+extruder controller. Has operated in a technical-founder capacity for ~6 years and values an engineering culture of openness, honesty, accountability, and high ownership.”

“Revamped a university academic calendar system into a Python-based calendar generation service, turning a weeks-long manual scheduling workflow into software that generates dozens of valid calendar combinations in under a minute. Also contributed to an Amazon search ML classifier by introducing precision/recall evaluation to better surface critical failure modes and improve prediction quality.”