About Me
Hi! I'm a grad student at MIT studying mechanical engineering, advised by Prof. Loza Tadesse. My current research interests include using optics and controls to build portable diagnostic devices, and I love working across the entire spectrum of CS/EE/MechE to build multidisciplinary systems. Outside of lab, I'm often teaching and tinkering in MIT's makerspaces. I'm also a huge proponent of touching grass. Any chance I get I try to go outside and run, hike, bike, swim, and spin fire poi!
Education
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MS in Mechanical Engineering: expected May 2025
BS in Computer Science & Cognitive Science: May 2024
Portfolio
Building an Automated System for High Throughput Diagnostics (2023 -)
Tadesse Lab project in progress
Currently building out the hardware and mechanical modules for a high throughput platform with modularity, cost, and accessibility in mind. My work has included PCB board design, writing custom firmware, and implementing serial communication across several submodules for system integration.
Built with Kicad, Marlin, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Fusion360 CAD
Mechanical, Optical, & Electronic Puzzle Cube (2024)
I made a puzzle cube for my wonderful electronics lab instructor who is also a professional trumpet player! A lot of the fun in making this was designing my circuits and mechanical components around 5 milled PCBs soldered together into a cube. Puzzles involve "playing" a sequence of notes on a flex PCB capacitive trumpet and using a butterfly flexure to align a laser path through a beamsplitter.
Built with Kicad, Fusion360 CAD
Engraved Brass Stamp (2024)
I made a wax seal brass stamp as a gift! The handle and body was machined on a lathe and joined with a press fit, and the design was engraved on a PCB mill.
Built with Fusion360 CAD/CAM
Persistence of Vision LED Poi PCB (2023 -)
Work in progress!
Inspired by Pyroterra Visual Poi, I am making my own low cost version. Features include an ESP32 microcontroller, rechargeable battery circuit, power negotiation between the battery and USB-C port, TL5947 shift register LED drivers, and daisy chained LED boards for extending prop length.
Built with Kicad
Trajectory Optimization of a Squirrel’s Righting Reflex (2023)
6.8210 Underactuated Robotics Final Project
Inspired by Mark Rober's squirrel launching platform, I modeled the righting reflex of a squirring traveling along a ballistic trajectory using direct collocation trajectory optimization. Using my model, I examine the role of the squirrel's legs and tail and plausibility of the squirrel completing multiple flips.
Built with Drake
Mechanical Doodle Jump (2023)
6.2050 Microcomputer Laboratory Final Project
A mechanical version of the platform jumping game Doodle Jump! The player controls the jumping dot's horizontal movement with clicky pen controllers, and a repurposed printer gear drive rotates the LED cube such that the player dot is always facing you. I wrote my own WS2812b library because the PSoC 5 microcontroller (which we were required to use) did not come with one.
Local Relighting of Real Scenes (2022)
Audrey Cui, Ali Jahanian, Agata Lapedriza, Antonio Torralba, Shahin Mahdizadehaghdam, Rohit Kumar, David Bau
We introduce the task of local relighting, which changes a photograph of a scene by switching on and off the light sources that are visible within the image. We propose an approach for local relighting that trains a model without supervision of any novel image dataset by using synthetically generated image pairs from another model.
Built with Pytorch
Paint by Word (2021)
Alex Andonian, Sabrina Osmany, Audrey Cui, YeonHwan Park, Ali Jahanian, Aude Oliva, Antonio Torralba, David Bau
We investigated the problem of zero-shot semantic image painting — by using an image-text similarity network to guide the gradients of an image generation model, we "paint" selected regions to fit textual descriptions.
Built with Pytorch
From Pixel to Paragraph: A Neural Artwork Analysis Paragraph Generator (2018 - 2020)
Inspired by the subjectivity of art in my local art museum, I developed a model that generates paragraphs analyzing input pieces of artwork. I modified LeakGAN (an unconditional GAN) to condition on input artwork features so that it can learn image-text relationships. To make this more user friendly, I developed an augmented reality interface on Unity.
Built with tensorflow, nltk, keras, numpy, BeautifulSoup, Unity, Microsoft Azure
Sewing
I enjoy making gowns, corsets, and capes from scratch! Making my own clothing is empowering as a practice of slow fashion. Typically I find a pattern that's generally in the cut that I'm going for, and then modify them into my desired silhouette.
(left to right): layered organza dress for learning how to sew sheer fabrics, gown for exploring pleating & gathering, corset + bolero, butterfly cape with soutache inspired bias tape designs
Welding
I run weekly welding trainings as a makerspace mentor and am always trying to improve my own technique across MIG/TIG on steel and aluminum.
Left: scrap aluminum stand for a >100lb grill
Right: steel fire fan frame
2D Animation
I animated the 2021 & 2022 MIT Pi Day announcement videos frame by frame with a small team of student animators/producers!
Built with Procreate
Writing
I used to write for the MIT Admissions blogs. I essentially have a time capsule of my undergraduate experience immortalized on the Internet, encompassing wholesome and challenging moments alike. Here are some of my favorites:
☘ it's getting colder and i'm getting older (on fall, friendship, and growing up - Nov 2023)
☘ City Strangers (a comic - Jun 2022)
☘ sea glass (turbulent waves in these parts - Feb 2022)
☘ things that are golden (a zine - Dec 2021)
☘ learning about Things!! (cool classes explained in easy words - Jan 2024)
☘ Drawing from Life (is that the boldest stroke you can make? - Jun 2023)
☘ this blogger does not exist (join me in the uncanny valley - Jan 2022)