Why do you want to come to TreeHacks 2026?*
TreeHacks is a place of union of new friendships but reunion of many old ones as well. As someone who’s attended ~50 hackathons I have a lot of friends who want to compete at TreeHacks and if accepted to TreeHacks I will have to reunite with the brilliant minds I have met at other hackathons such as LAHacks, CalHacks, Hack the North, and more. I will also have the opportunity to attend fun workshops and consume free food (heard great things about treehacks food!) which is a bonus.
Tell us about a project you’ve enjoyed working on, technical or non-technical.
I run ChessHacks, a hackathon where participants train AI models to play chess. Building chess models is a solved problem, but doing it in 36 hours is where the real engineering challenge comes in.
As an organizer, I designed RL environments and verifiers for post-training, wrote an optimized AlphaZero implementation, and trained it on an A100 for the event.
With personal projects you can brute-force things and ignore performance; when you’re deploying—especially in a time-boxed hackathon—it has to work, and it has to be fast. I built a highly optimized Monte Carlo Tree Search that batches network forward passes so we can generate self-play games 13x faster for RL.
This was fun because it made me step outside of my comfort zone of getting things to work to getting things to work well.
What’s something you’re excited to work on in the next 10 years? Dream big!*
I am currently working on Autonomous Drones for surveillance. I am in process of training my own Vision Language Action model (VLA) where I am training an action layer on top of Qwen to operate the drone.
The drone will be able to look at it’s surroundings and perform actions based on what it sees.
There are a lot of technical challenges with this, the main one being lack of annotated data to train the VLA. Legal challenges such as getting past flight regulations especially for autonomous flights.
I want to make this a company who’s technology is helping make the world a safer place, I want to make a difference in my time here
Tell us a fun fact about you :)*
I love working on cars, I somehow impulsively bought a 1999 Mazda Miata (in addition to already owning one) which I am preparing for the track. One day I want to make my own car from the ground up