see · drive · fly learn · predict · speak measure · analyze · explain
I build intelligent systems, and I stay with them until a customer is using them. So far that's meant training models, flying drones in a motion-capture lab, compiling Windows installers, and pricing the quote.
I'm VP of Engineering and Operations at Araca, a semiconductor wafer-polishing (CMP) equipment and services company in Tucson. I joined in February 2026 as a software engineer and built Araca Insights from scratch: an offline desktop app that turns polishing test data into analysis and reports, work Araca estimates at 35-95 hours per project by hand. It ships as a licensed product with an on-premises LLM agent, so customer data stays on site. Today I own that product line, lead our slurry flow program (4K, 240 fps polishing video turned into flow measurements with OpenCV and AI segmentation), and own revenue for two business units.
I finished my M.S. in Computer Science at the University of Arizona in May 2026. My thesis adapted a vision-language-action driving model to a new simulator and raised route coverage from 4.7% to 99.1%. I've published two peer-reviewed journal articles, one on drone swarm formation control and one on VR drone teleoperation. Before software, I spent five years running commercial operations for a food manufacturing group of about 500 people.
I train models that end up inside a product. I've fine-tuned a vision-language-action model with LoRA on one 16 GB GPU, trained prediction models with scikit-learn and FLAML AutoML, and built an on-premises LLM agent that answers questions about process data.
Measurements out of video. I lead a program that turns 4K, 240 fps polishing footage into flow measurements with OpenCV and SAM 2.1 segmentation, plus FFT analysis to detect platen speed. In the lab I ran stereo SLAM on a ZED camera to rebuild a drone's surroundings in 3D.
I've put controllers and links on real hardware: a decentralized formation controller on six Crazyflie quadrotors, a VR teleoperation link from a Meta Quest 3 to ROS 2 on a Jetson, and the camera and compute side of an interceptor drone on ArduPilot.
The work that starts once the code runs. I've shipped compiled Windows builds with an installer and node-locked license keys, and I led the license negotiation with the customer. I also handle quotes, pricing, hiring and revenue for two business units.
Each one I built hands-on. Click through for the full case study.
Offline desktop app for semiconductor polishing test data. It imports instrument files, plays back and compares runs, predicts process results, and exports Excel and PowerPoint reports, work Araca estimates at 35-95 hours per project by hand. I built it from scratch and shipped it as a licensed product, with an on-premises LLM agent that answers questions about the data.
I adapted SimLingo, a vision-language-action driving model trained in CARLA, to Quanser's QLabs digital twin of the QCar 2. Fine-tuned with LoRA on 7,498 expert frames, it raised route coverage from 4.7% to 99.1% in simulation, steering from a single camera at 4 Hz.
Third-person VR control for a drone. I built the link from WebXR on a Meta Quest 3 to ROS 2 on a Jetson Orin NX running ZED camera SLAM. Across 8 trials, the third-person view kept the drone 0.20 m farther from obstacles than first-person view, at about the same task time.
Decentralized formation control for drone swarms. Three leaders follow planned paths, and the followers work out their own positions from their neighbors alone, with no central planner. I flight-tested it on six Crazyflie 2.1 quadrotors under Vicon motion capture.
First author, with H. Rastgoftar. "Decentralized Affine Transformation for Scalable and Safe Multi-Agent Aerial Coordination." Vol. 180, art. 113539.
Second author, with J. T. Hughes, M. Ghufran and H. Rastgoftar. "VR-Based Control of Multicopter Operation." 41(2):46-55, Feb 2026.
"Adapting Vision-Language-Action Models to New Domains: A Case Study with SimLingo on QCar 2." Committee: Chicheng Zhang and Hossein Rastgoftar (co-chairs), Eduardo Blanco.
Reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (T-ASE): 2 manuscripts in 2026.
Working on ML, computer vision or robotics software? I'd like to hear about it.