Projects
Professional
Talk: Evolution and Unification of Pinterest ML Platform (2021)
Talk at apply() Conference, April 21, 2021. (10 minutes)
Pinterest Related Pins Recommendations
I worked on Pinterest Related Pins 2015–2017, as tech lead and later as engineering manager. In 2017 we published this paper at the World Wide Web conference…
Pinterest Visual Search
In 2014, I built infrastructure for image feature extraction and object detection at scale to power visual search at Pinterest. We published a paper at KDD 2…
Personal Projects
FPV drones (2021)
I build and fly first-person-view (FPV) drones – manually piloting while viewing a remote video feed through remote goggles.
Mystic Merkaba light sculpture (2019)
“Mystic Merkaba” is a light sculpture inspired by sacred geometry. Sound-reactive, 3D-printed, with 1,080 addressable LEDs. I originally built this in April-…
Smart Pullup Bar (2017)
I built an automatic pullup counter for our office pull-up bar. You scan your work badge, then it senses and tallies your pullups.
DIY Core Cooling Glove (2015)
The CoreControl is a device designed at Stanford, which can supposedly improve athletic recovery by cooling down the body’s core temperature. They postulate …
Wall Hanging LED Board (2014)
I built a huge wall-mounted LED matrix, 2’x4’ with 20x10 LEDs, and wrote various visual effects for it. I was inspired by several other LED builds like the P…
Multi-Room Audio Control with Raspberry Pi (2014)
I put together a whole-home audio controller using the $35 Raspberry Pi computer and some custom hardware and software. It can be controlled from any mobile …
Anagram Thief, an online multiplayer word game (2011)
I built an exciting, real-time multiplayer game where you steal each other’s letters to create as many words as possible, as fast as possible.
Locra, a community service hub (2010)
I co-founded Locra, a site where volunteers connect with their teammates in service projects, and build a profile of their “service footprint.”
School
Semantic Image Analysis and Image Exploration (Research project 2008-2010)
Extending my previous research, I built an image search engine that searches images based on their semantic concepts.
Content-Based Image Retrieval (Research project 2007-2008)
I built an image search that combines color and texture to find similar images.
JavaScript Truss Solver (2012)
This is an interactive physics calculator that allows you to draw a truss structure (such as a model of a bridge), add supports and loads, and calculate the …
Continually Adapting Speech Recognition Models (Research project 2009-2010)
I improved MIT CSAIL’s speech recognition engine to enable it to adapt continually to user input.
Acoustic Music Similarity Analysis (Research project 2006-2007)
I built a fully automatic approach for recommending music based on “how it sounds,” using musical characteristics like instrumentation, tempo, and mood.
RFID-Based Robot Navigation (Research project 2006)
In my 8th grade science fair project, I explored how RFID technology can be used to improve robot navigation algorithms.
FINALE, a block-matching puzzle action game (2008)
FINALE is a block-matching (Tetris-like) puzzle game, inspired by the critically acclaimed “Lumines: Puzzle Fusion”.