Vetted Research Assistants in Pennsylvania

“Python backend engineer focused on high-throughput document/PDF processing systems, building end-to-end pipelines that extract structured content for downstream NLP use cases. Demonstrates strong practical MLOps-adjacent infrastructure skills: Kubernetes deployments, GitLab CI, GitOps workflows, and an incremental migration to AWS using EC2/Lambda tradeoffs. Deep hands-on optimization experience (selective OCR, layout-aware extraction, parallelism, caching, idempotency, and backpressure/autoscaling).”

“Robotics software engineer who built and tuned a contact-implicit MPC controller for a full planar pushing manipulation pipeline (“Push Anything”), including a key fix for complementarity violations that eliminated “ghost pushes” and cut time-to-goal from 40s to 25s. Hands-on with ROS/MoveIt on real robot pick-and-place, improving hardware grasp reliability through TF/frame debugging, and uses Drake/URDF for simulation, contact detection, and MPC development.”

“Built ToolDreamer, a framework for selecting relevant tools for LLM agents by training a retriever on LLM-generated reasoning traces, and has hands-on experience building multi-agent systems in AutoGen (MAG-V) focused on question generation and tool-trajectory verification. Currently works as an AI-guides supervisor at Penn State, regularly communicating AI concepts to non-technical stakeholders.”

“UPenn robotics researcher who architected a real-time autonomous driving decision-making engine, integrating LSTM trajectory prediction with MPC in CARLA and adding conformal prediction to deliver 95% statistical safety guarantees under strict latency constraints. Also built and debugged an autonomous quadrotor stack with ESKF-based 6-DoF tracking and optimized A*/Dijkstra planning to eliminate latency-induced instability, with experience bridging heterogeneous simulation/control systems.”

“Robotics Support Engineer at HAI Robotics supporting a 385-robot warehouse fleet at a Shein client site. Built a production automation and reporting workflow to diagnose and resolve abnormal shelf locations, cutting incidents from ~250/day to ~25/day while providing actionable root-cause data to client/ops/maintenance. Hands-on ROS 2 (Humble) debugging across Nav2/localization/TF and sensor integration issues including QoS and firmware coordination.”