hi! i'm bryan
i study cs and physics at usc. i like building machines that see and act.
right now i'm developing fluid systems at pando, a surgical startup. on the side i'm building new tools, including a haptic migraine relief system.
previously i was a research intern at ucsc in ai + hci, working on fall detection for senior care. we built a camera system that watches for falls without anyone wearing a device: a video-language model reads the live feed, audio is transcribed alongside it, and segment anything marks out safe zones like beds and couches so lying down isn't flagged as a fall. it reached a 92% f1 score and runs on a raspberry pi (paper).
that work led to dual-model distillation (dmd), presented at a neurips 2024 workshop. big video-language models are too heavy for edge devices, so dmd trains a small switcher that predicts when the on-device model is likely wrong and only then sends the clip to a larger cloud model, which cuts latency and compute while improving accuracy.
before that i was at stanford hai through ai4all, where i taught a plane to taxi itself in x-plane: a small neural net reads the nose camera and a pid controller keeps it on the centerline.
in high school i co-founded and captained vex robotics team 95071x — national champions in 2024 and world semifinalists in 2022 & 2025. across our robots i worked on path planning and odometry for our autonomous routines, vision-based alignment, power-takeoff transmissions, and custom aluminum, steel, and polyoxymethylene (delrin) parts made on the cnc, lathe, and laser cutter.
some of the robots i built (click one to see it):
- — national champions. the only team that season with a transmission-powered winch for the high climb plus a c-tier hang, and we set the season's world record in driver skills. record run · worlds teaser
- — world semifinalists. the first robot to use a "tipper latch," which hooks mobile goals and snaps them out of opponents' clamps. we lost the semifinal replay by 2 points. worlds recap · season recap · design reveal
- — my final high school build.
things i'm into:
- photography
- humanoid robotics / ros
- food
- travel
i like meeting people. send me an email!