pronounced like you-know!

I am an engineer who is passionate about tackling underserved problems.

• XR-Robot-Teleop-Server/Client — a great open-source robot teleoperation software stack.
• PoDoFo — an open source, feature-packed PDF app for modern working professionals.
• Audiobookify — an open source audiobook generator (TTS) with extremely high quality voices that runs fully on-device.

• SightWise – a startup dedicated to building best-in-class assistive technologies for the blind and visually impaired.
• Alt Text Wizard – a browser extension that generates alt text in real time using multimodal LLMs.
• A bunch of other (hopefully) interesting side projects!

I am a generalist with a diverse set of interests—and love delving into new, unfamiliar sub-fields of engineering all of the time.

That said, my area of expertise (in which I spent enough time to build substantial skillsets) are:

• perception, control, and motion planning for robotic systems
• training and tuning of large transformer models, and infusing different encoders for multi-modality (e.g., 3D point cloud)
  • vision-language models (VLMs)!
• inference optimization of machine learning algorithms (for on-device / edge inference)
• building software systems in general (web, app, backend/database, CLI tools, and a hint of systems-level programs)

• Simplifying the process of porting ML models to web/mobile environments
• Studying Apache TVM, compilers, and high-performance computing
• How to be less perfectionistic (& risk-averse) and more efficient

I am always down for a coffee chat! Just leave me a message.

• Tech Blog
• Photo Blog
• Personal Blog

My life goal is to contribute to the world by working on things that deserve—but fail to—catch the attention of the industry.

So far, I have encountered a few important topics that fit into this description in my life:

• Access to high-quality knowledge content for non-English speakers

  • An unfair amount of academic lectures and articles are strictly available in English.
  • We are equipped with powerful machine translation technologies as a society, but these have not been deployed to end-user tools to where people can comfortably translate textbooks, lectures, and assignments to learn in their own language.

• Assistive technologies that can enhance the quality of life of individuals with sensory impairments

  • The world we live in are not designed with sensory impairment in mind. This includes roads, products, interfaces, even schools and public buildings.
    • Our society presents loads more challenges and safety risks for them, while offering them less opportunity for success (e.g., in schools / jobs).
  • We have lots of room for improvement in this end, as a society and as a field (of engineering).
    • A part of this are societal/infrastructural issues, but modern technology has a lot to offer to help with respect to frustrations that commonly arise during activities of daily living (ADLs).
  • For example: visual impairment is a lot more common than people realize, and a lot more detrimental than people realize.
    • I am not putting as much time into building visual assistance systems as I did before, but I am going to continue until it is truly considered "solved".
    • Projects like Project Astra are very exciting!

I plan to keep working really hard on stuff like this.

If I can ever build a product with a positive societal impact like the Dot Pad, I will consider my life a big success on my deathbed.