Computer Engineering · CS / EE
Design. Build. Deploy.
Computer Engineering @ UIUC - Building at the intersection of hardware and software.
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Hello! My name is Rishi Vemulapalli, and I'm a Computer Engineering major with a Data Science minor (AI/ML focus) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, graduating May 2027.
I enjoy building projects that have to actually work - I have trained a machine learning model for tweet classification, written the autonomous navigation software for a competition VEX robot, and designed the PCB for an ESP32 racing dashboard. One project needed both sides at once was a fitness tracker's sensor-fusion classifier, trained in Python, then hand-ported to C with plans to deploy onto a microcontroller.
Currently looking for internships in software engineering, embedded systems, ML engineering, or robotics - open to wherever the work is interesting.
Technical Skills
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The physics and rendering system behind this site's own hero canvas - momentum-conserving collisions, inverse-square cursor gravity, a tiered particle-effect system, and the performance work behind it.
Real-time failure detection combining YOLOv8 computer vision with a 1D CNN on accelerometer data. Runs on-device via ONNX runtime - 40% reduction in false positives over baseline heuristics.
F1-style sim racing DDU merged into ESP-SimHub as a real feature (ARQ transport + Custom Serial Protocol), on a custom through-hole PCB with an ILI9488/XPT2046 display and dual PWM wind-simulation fans.
Regression models over 21k+ race rows predicting lap-time delta from pit strategy variables. R²=0.32, statistical significance testing via bootstrapped CIs.
Full C++ navigation stack: Kalman filter odometry, and Pure Pursuit path tracking. Qualified for the 2024, 2025, and 2026 VEXU World Championship.
Sensor fusion pipeline merging accelerometer and gyroscope streams. Real-time activity recognition using ensemble Python ML models.
C++ desktop app with libcurl live data feeds and a custom ImGui candlestick chart renderer. Sub-second refresh with memory-mapped ring buffer.
PyTorch BiLSTM (851k params) classifying COVID-19 tweets. 76.8% accuracy on held-out test set with custom tokenization pipeline.
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Shop Attendant
The Shop · Siebel Center for Design, UIUC
Supporting fabrication and prototyping at UIUC's design and innovation hub. Assisting students and researchers with tools, equipment, and rapid-prototyping workflows.
Programming Lead & Full-Stack Developer
Illini VEX Robotics · UIUC
Leading the software team for UIUC's competitive VEX robotics club. Architected the autonomous navigation stack (Kalman filter, Pure Pursuit) that qualified for the 2024 VEXU World Championship.
Co-Founder, Lead Programmer & Mentor
RoboHawks Robotics Club · Jericho, NY
Co-founded and scaled a competitive robotics program from zero. Mentored students across multiple seasons in embedded programming, autonomous systems, and competition strategy.
Mentor
Jericho VEX Robotics Club · Jericho, NY
Previously led the team as Captain and primary programmer. Designed control software and autonomous routines. Mentored members on Java and robot kinematics.
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Open to internship opportunities in ML engineering, robotics, or systems software. Always happy to talk about interesting problems.
Open to opportunities · Summer / Fall 2026