Projects

Selected work, at more depth than a résumé line. Two threads run through all of it: physics-shaped machine learning, and an allergy to renting servers when a machine at home will do.

1 · SAR-MAE

Masked autoencoders, tuned for radar instead of photographs. SAR imagery breaks the assumptions photographic pretraining recipes rest on — speckle, geometry-dependent scattering, phenomenology that shifts with aspect angle — so SAR-MAE is a pretraining recipe built around what a radar image actually is: physics-aware masking and augmentation rules (axis and flip constraints that respect the imaging geometry) with calibration-gated evaluation, so a run that games one metric doesn't ship.

The technique family carries into my work at ARA: masked-autoencoder models for identifying occluded and under-represented targets — benchmarked on MSTAR against a ResNet18 baseline under synthetic occlusion, with orders-of-magnitude improvement even for minimally occluded targets — and for rejecting confusers in SAR ATR.

2 · Discrank

A Discord chat bot born at the 2016 Riot Games API Challenge that refused to stay a demo. At its peak Discrank served 400,000+ users across 4,000+ servers — hosted, for most of its life, on an old laptop sitting next to my desktop.

It outgrew its League of Legends origins: a sound-tag system that pulled short audio clips from YouTube and played them into voice channels, a Games Done Quick tracker, a Wolfram|Alpha integration (sponsored with a full developer API key), and a "classmates" plugin that watched UIUC course registration and pinged you the moment a seat opened in that impossible gen-ed. Riot's constantly changing API meant the bot was never finished — which was half the fun.

Fig. P.1 — Discrank in action, demo capture.

3 · Sidekick

A self-hosted personal assistant that lives on my own hardware. Daily pulse briefings, Japanese vocabulary drills, and LLM inference running locally on my GPU instead of someone else's cloud — built end to end: API backend, Android app, and the ops to keep it all alive on a home network.

4 · subfwd

The "unnamed full-stack project" from my old résumé, now real: novelty subdomain forwarding as a tiny SaaS. Users claim a subdomain and point it anywhere — DNS-level redirects, temporary redirects, email forwarding — behind OAuth sign-in, PayPal billing, and Safe Browsing screening of redirect targets. The whole service runs on a Raspberry Pi behind a Cloudflare tunnel.