2024 Highlight Reel
- 🎉 Graduated with two Master's degrees from MIT
- 🦾 Featured in MIT News for research with on how Fortune 500 companies are planning for the future of work post-generative AI
- 🍦 Covered in Wired for Sundai Club, a hacker and builder community I co-founded
- 🧠Went on incredible travel adventures! Saw my first glacier in Iceland and visited Mayan hell (ATM caves in Belize) and then heaven (Tikal in Guatemala) over a 48-hour period
Sundai Club
In January 2024 I (co) started Sundai Club, an incredibly talented group of makers and founders that meets every Sunday to plan and launch a complete product in just 24 hours. It became my strongest community in Cambridge, meaningful in my third year of school when many classmates had already graduated and left town.
Every week, we met and built. What started as just three of us turned into something incredible:
- Hundreds of hackers from across the U.S. (and Canada!) have joined Sundai build sessions
- 772 members joined our online community, where we discuss AI resources and breakthroughs, share code, and offer feedback
- Other wins: startups spun out, co-founders and collaborators connected, and one couple (two of my very good friends) met at a Sundai Club and started dating a month later!
Some of my favorite weekly hacks were a 3D model generator combining two recently published methods, a no-code chatbot builder for travel influencers, an app that lets a party add filters to the movies they're watching, and a product that generates a series of TikTok-style videos from all those business books you've been meaning to read.
We also gave back, working with the Virtue Foundation to connect doctors who are planning their first mission trip to the sites around the world where they're needed most. Code from every project was published and shared so that others could use it to speed up their workflows and learn from it.
If anyone from Sundai is reading this, thank you so much for everything, building something with you all has been the learning experience of a lifetime.
At a St. Patrick's Day party we turned a Sundai Hack (video filters Chrome Extension) into a live collaborative party tool
Graduation
I spent the better part of 2021-24 at MIT working towards two degrees: an MS in the Integrated Design and Management (IDM) program and an MS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Graduation was bittersweet; it was the last year students would be graduating from IDM, which had wound down in the years I attended. IDM was an interdisciplinary design program for people at a crossroads, eager to challenge the status quo yet unsure how to fit that ambition into a traditional career path. Each student arrives with significant professional accomplishments and a shared "love" attribute: a commitment to making the world meaningfully better. At MIT, where most people follow highly focused paths, IDM offered a haven for a community of changemakers figuring it out together.
Highlights from my final semester
- Volunteered at the Racial Justice in Education Hackathon by Hacking the Archive‍
- Mentored and Judged the Startup Track at MIT Reality Hack‍
- Participated in #HackDisability: AI for Accessibility. My team followed the human-centered design process to create Vizability, a tool that allows blind and low-vision professionals build reliable data visualizations to share information with their sighted colleagues. Josh Miele, Amazon's resident MacArthur Fellow, supported us in the hack's planning, design, and testing.
I'm grateful to have been part of Stefanie Mueller's HCI Engineering research group at MIT CSAIL, where I learned about the research process from an incredibly inspiring, creative, and genuinely kind group of humans. My Master's thesis focused on research I supported in the lab, exploring how new makers can modify and stylize open-source 3D models.
Explored Generative AI Use Cases
Excited about the huge technological shift we're living through, I spent time this year working closely with practitioners across industries to experiment with ways that generative AI-based tools could fit into and support their existing workflows. In addition to building, I shared what I learned at speaking engagements with the Gen AI Collective, AI Tinkerers, and Pie & AI.
Industrial Design
Working closely with my friend and classmate Saloni, a professional industrial designer, I mapped out the many areas designers spend their time in. For this first experiment, I built tools that fit into each step, saving designers time.
The interface of the tools organizes them into which stage of a designer's workflow where they fit (ideation, iteration, and refinement). In the refinement step, I built a tool that automates the Photoshop-heavy work of editing their renders into photographs for presentations. Other tools included automations for creating seamless patterns and matching the style and fidelity of multiple designers' work before anything is shared. I dive into these in details in the IDAI Tools Launch blog post.
Video Editing
This year, I joined an incredible team of video editors and producers creating ads to support Harris in the general election. After user interviews and observation, I quickly learned that these  experts were swift at brainstorming (honestly, nothing was more fun than watching producers ideate in the most outrageous directions) and video editing itself. So, I narrowed in on the "boring work," the research stage in between. I built a tool that enabled them to more quickly and easily search for specific clips online, either by:
- Specific language: For example, the tool would find the exact timestamp and transcript where someone at a rally made a specific statement or discussed a particular topic.
- Visual content: For example, finding clips of high school students in Detroit engaged in community service.
Learn More about AI-powered video products
Disaster Response
In collaboration with a disaster response expert, I co-created a project that reimagines disaster response through decentralized technologies. Combining AI agents, drones, and decentralized communication, we built a resilient system capable of detecting disasters and coordinating responses without traditional infrastructure. I write more about this project here.
Education
Education is personal for me, with seven years of experience working closely with K–12 teachers and students. I partnered with Dunya, an incredible student from Afghanistan, to create Hidden Torch, an offline AI tutor designed to support Afghan girls banned from school since 2021, many of whom lack reliable internet access.
Built on a Raspberry Pi 5, Hidden Torch integrates Google Speech Recognition, Gemma 2B, and a Coqui Farsi text-to-speech model to deliver context-specific offline tutoring. The result is a low-cost, accessible device capable of delivering high-impact education anywhere.
