VEX Robotics Team 6460
The beginning of the robotics thread: mechanisms, iteration, repairs, and teamwork under competition pressure.
Start here
Pebl Health
Invented a patent-pending biometrics logger and led a 3-person team from 3D design through PCB, firmware, iOS, and an AI health assistant.
In the house: Pebl + Research Lab
Intertek
Automated FIPS and Common Criteria security-requirement testing and supported certification work for major technology companies.
In the house: Pebl + Research Lab
Quantum Sensing
Built machine-learning, vision, and precision-motion systems to read quantum magnetic-field data (ODMR) and drive micrometer-scale fabrication.
In the house: Pebl + Research Lab
CrossWeave
Designed a social platform that pulls people out of their filter bubble toward unfamiliar communities and perspectives. There is a live demo.
In the house: Interfaces + Learning Studio
Timeline
2018-2019
VEX Robotics Team 6460
Competition robotics made engineering physical: mechanisms, iteration, failure, repair, and teamwork under pressure.
2019-present
MARTI outreach + youth mentoring
Mentored 5th-12th graders for years and coordinated the mentor team, founded a STEM academy teaching cybersecurity and programming, and organized interfaith gatherings. This is the thread that runs under everything else here.
Room: Mentoring Room
2021
Artificial Intelligence Today
Four UMBC expert interviews became a paper, presentation, video, and an early investigation of AI ethics, transparency, and capability.
2021-2022
PLTW Engineering
Bridge testing, mechanisms, circuits, aerodynamics, and prototyping expanded robotics into a broader engineering practice.
Room: Technical Background
Aug 2021-Jan 2022
Morgan State robotic prosthetic arm
3D modeled, printed, and assembled a robotic prosthetic arm using Fusion 360 and Arduino.
Room: Technical Background
Sep 2022-Jan 2025
Intertek / Acumen Security
Supported FIPS certification for Samsung, Oracle, and Intel modules, automated cybersecurity requirement testing with Python3 and C, and built a tokenization tool that turns module specs into security test plans.
Room: Pebl + Research Lab
Mar-Apr 2024
MentorTracker
Built a React and Firebase portal that let mentors set goals and follow a mentee’s personal development over time.
Jun-Sep 2024
Quantum Sensor Technologies
Predicted vector magnetic fields from ODMR data with Fourier-transformed MLPs, and built a Python-driven lithography machine for micrometer-scale antenna manufacturing.
Room: Pebl + Research Lab
Sep 2024-present
Pebl Health
Took a patent-pending handheld biometrics logger from concept through firmware, PCB design, enclosure CAD, and native iOS and web apps; it is now entering injection-molded production. Raising a $1.5M pre-seed; completed the AARP AgeTech Accelerator, NSF I-Corps, and the Johns Hopkins Pava Center Fuel accelerator.
Room: Pebl + Research Lab
Aug 2025-present
House of Nur, the JHU hacker house
Founded and lead an eight-person hacker house: a basement robotics and electronics lab, an Embodied AI club, Biryani Wednesdays, visits from professors and deans, and shared systems for living.
Feb 2026-present
CrossWeave at Johns Hopkins CLSP
Built the interface and non-NLP product systems for a social-media experiment designed to bridge communities and broaden perspectives.
Technical Background
The early work taught me to think with my hands.
VEX Team 6460 (Robot Skills Champion), PLTW engineering, the Morgan State robotic prosthetic arm, Artificial Intelligence Today, and Memory-SmolVLA: the robotics thread from first build to research.
First systems
VEX 6460 · AI Today · where the building started
Artificial Intelligence Today
Four UMBC expert interviews became a paper, presentation, video, and hand-built research portfolio about AI capability, ethics, and access.
PLTW bench
structure · test · iterate · eleventh and twelfth grade
PLTW Engineering
Bridge analysis, mechanisms, circuits, aerodynamics, and load testing widened robotics into a broader making practice.
PLTW Bridge Build + Test
The original build photograph and test footage show the engineering loop directly: predict, fabricate, load, inspect, and revise.
PLTW Adjustable Catapult
An adjustable catapult tuned for range: change the arm stop and the release angle, then measure how far each setting throws.
PLTW Wind Tunnel Test
Smoke streamlines in the classroom wind tunnel, showing where the flow stays attached and where it breaks into turbulence.
PLTW Digital Logic
A breadboarded logic circuit: gates wired by hand, LEDs reading out the truth table one input combination at a time.
PLTW Balsa Glider
A balsa glider from the PLTW aerodynamics unit. Lift, drag, and center of gravity worked out on the bench before the throw.
The PLTW Engineering Lab
The PLTW engineering lab: benches, tools, and half-finished builds. Eleventh and twelfth grade happened in this room.
Prosthetic arm
CAD · print · wire · control
Robotic Prosthetic Arm
3D modeled in Fusion 360, printed, assembled, wired, and driven with Arduino. An early end-to-end robotics build from the Morgan State engineering internship.
Prosthetic Arm: Build Evidence
The prototype up close, and moving. CAD became printed parts, tendon routing, electronics, and Arduino control.
Pebl + Research Lab
Measurement matters when the whole product holds together.
Pebl, a patent-pending biometrics logger taken from 3D design to PCB to testing, plus ODMR quantum sensing, a homebuilt lithography machine, SPDF medical-device security, and the Raz concept.
Quantum optics
ODMR · optics · precision motion
Quantum Sensor Systems
The optical bench at Quantum Sensor Technologies. Behind it sit Fourier-transformed MLPs predicting magnetic fields from ODMR data, and a Python-driven lithography machine for micrometer-scale antenna manufacturing.
YOLO Electrode Tracking
Machine vision steering micro-electrodes a tenth the size of a cell: recordings of manual nanowire control, processed with CV2 and trained into TensorFlow CNNs and YOLO models so the tracking could outpace a human hand.
ODMR Field Prediction
One sample from the quantum ML pipeline: an ODMR contrast sweep in, a predicted vector magnetic field out. K-nearest trees and Fourier-transformed MLPs do the predicting.
ODMR Sensor Scan
An ODMR scan reads a magnetic field off the fluorescence dip of nitrogen-vacancy centers as the microwave frequency sweeps.
ODMR Model Training
Loss and accuracy curves for the model that reads the ODMR signal: convergence over epochs, the machine-learning half of the sensing pipeline.
Microscope Lithography Stage
The precision mechanics behind microscope-laser lithography and machine-vision alignment.
Homebuilt Lithography: Optics
The optics of a homebuilt lithography machine, focusing a pattern down onto a coated substrate to expose micron-scale features.
Homebuilt Lithography: Mask
The mask stage of the same rig: the stencil that decides which parts of the substrate see light and which stay covered.
CNC Antenna Machining
CNC-milling an antenna part. This is the fabrication side of the lab, where a design file becomes a physical component to spec.
Pebl
a product, not only a prototype
Pebl One
The patent-pending Personal Electronic Biometrics Logger, invented, designed, and prototyped end to end: 3D design, PCB design, embedded firmware, software, and testing, leading a team of three.
Pebl Live Demonstration
Pebl outside the lab. Handheld devices on a public event table, live measurements running, and the team standing there to explain what the numbers mean.
Pebl Labs
Prototypes and development equipment on the Pebl bench, which is where the device spends most of its life before it looks like a product.
SPDF: Secure Product Development Framework
A secure firmware reference implementation for medical telemetry on the ESP32-S3 (ESP-IDF/FreeRTOS): secure boot, record-level encryption, secure OTA, SBOM traceability, threat modeling, and FDA SPDF + HIPAA evidence.
Pebl Prototype in Hand
Another angle on the Pebl prototype, at hand-scale, where the industrial design has to feel right and not only measure right.
Pebl at Vitalist Bay
Showing Pebl at Vitalist Bay 2026, out of the lab and in front of a room of people who build health technology.
Raz + concepts
edge intelligence · motion · presence
Raz
A home-health companion concept connecting ambient sensing, clinical Pebl assessments, mobility support, and local-first intelligence.
NeuroPen Concept
A concept for putting health sensing and guidance into the shape of a pen, an object people already know how to hold.
Security lab
FIPS · Common Criteria · the Intertek years
Security Engineer I
Three years at Intertek / Acumen Security in Rockville: FIPS certification for Samsung, Oracle, and Intel modules, automated cybersecurity requirement testing in Python3 and C, and a tokenization tool that turns a module's specs and claims into security test plans. Networking fundamentals and a Google IT Support certificate sit underneath all of it.
Interfaces + Learning Studio
Interfaces shape what people can understand, practice, and encounter.
CrossWeave (CSCW '26) built at the JHU Center for Language and Speech Processing, LinguaLeap, MentorTracker, PersonaPlay, and a semester assisting the HCI course.
LinguaLeap
language practice · realtime conversation
LinguaLeap Per-Word Mastery
Mastery is four numbers, not one. Opening a word breaks it into recognition, recall, production, and usage, each earned by a different kind of exercise, so the AI can tell "knows it when she sees it" apart from "can say it unprompted" and pick what to practise next across all 500 words.
- View image
- Open LinguaLeap (live site)
LinguaLeap Learning Dashboard
Team 07's learning dashboard, which is where progress and the next thing to practise wait between sessions.
- View image
- Open LinguaLeap (live site)
LinguaLeap Session Summary
What a practice session actually moved: fifteen words improved, four errors, and the before-and-after mastery for each one. Progress is reported per word rather than as a streak, so the next session has something to aim at.
- View image
- Open LinguaLeap (live site)
CrossWeave
perspective · communities · reflection
CrossWeave Feed
The live #ChineseEVs discussion in CrossWeave. The whole front-end was built at the JHU Center for Language and Speech Processing with Professors Xiao, Eisner, and Piccardi, and published at CSCW '26.
- View image
- Open the CrossWeave demo (live site)
CrossWeave Composer
Drafting a reply: the interface answers with feedback in the voice of a patient moderator and three simulated reactions to the draft, while the perspective panel keeps labelled contributions (framing, evidence, proposals) in view. Submission stays disabled for a few seconds so the reactions are read rather than skipped.
- View image
- Open the CrossWeave demo (live site)
CrossWeave Perspective Panel
The response column runs beside the feed so other perspectives stay in view while you read, which makes comparing them part of reading rather than a separate trip.
- View image
- Open the CrossWeave demo (live site)
HCI studio
critique · facilitation · making
HCI Course Assistant
Course-assistant work: running critique, unblocking teams, and helping students get from a concept to something that actually responds.
PersonaPlay
A team HCI project, presented in the same lecture hall where it was built and critiqued.
Shipped products
mentortracker.org · hizmetsearch.com
MentorTracker
A private-by-design portal for setting goals, reflecting on habits, and sharing progress with a chosen mentor.
- View image
- Open MentorTracker (live site)
HizmetSearch
Semantic search across Islamic scholarship: source-grounded answers with verifiable citations in Turkish, Arabic, and English, plus a chat mode for longer research.
- View image
- Open HizmetSearch (live site)
Also in the archive
Side Quests Board
The smaller builds that never earned a whole room: Boring Businesses (blockchain + AI wealth experiments), a TensorFlow vision rig steering micro-electrodes a tenth the size of a cell, English translations for River of Peace's seerah films, a $12,000 campaign that repaired a school in Dar es Salaam, and the petition + ArcGIS plan for a safer park in Blue Stream.
- View image
- Open the classic projects page (live site)
Mentoring Room
The work here only makes sense over years.
Seven years mentoring 5th-12th graders through MARTI: grade-group tables, a STEM academy teaching cybersecurity and programming, CPR and college-application workshops, campus visits, and trips.
6th grade table
skills · games · ordinary afternoons
Basketball Day
Pickup game on a MARTI youth day. Six mentees, one green court, one mentor behind the camera.
Lakeside Day
Lakeside selfie with a 3D-printed skull along for show-and-tell. Mentoring and making travel together.
Kayaking Day
Vests zipped, spray flying. One kayak, one pedal boat, one canoe, early-spring water.
8th grade table
trust grows through shared adventures
Soccer Game Trip
Post-game pizza. Seven years of mentoring 5th-12th graders, and the field trips that keep them coming back.
JHU Campus Visit
Campus visit in soccer jerseys, with Gilman's clock tower doing the persuading.
Group Meal
After the outing, at Khana, A Claypot Grille. Foil wraps, curry and rice, orange soda.
10th grade table
campuses · seminars · larger possibilities
Rafting on the Water
Bow seats on the rapids: six red vests, one unbothered guide, everybody mid-scream.
Space Observatory Visit
Observatory night: red light to save night vision, the moon in the dome slit, one kid on the eyepiece.
Events wall
workshops and outings the whole group shared
CPR Workshop
Safety skills day: compressions on the manikins, a HeartStart AED trainer waiting its turn.
College Seminar
College applications, walked through in order, for the high schoolers who were about to file them.
Georgetown Overlook
Six mentees at the Georgetown overlook. A college visit is how 'someday' turns into a skyline.
STEM Academy
teaching kids to build · robotics, 3D, code
STEM Academy Teaching Floor
Nine afternoons at STEM Academy: 3D modeling, robotics, a homemade microscope, block coding, and a low-poly cat print. The room where I taught younger students to build.
House of Nur + Gatherings
A house, a meal, or an event can become shared infrastructure.
The House of Nur, a JHU hacker house of eight with a basement robotics lab, an Embodied AI club, and Biryani Wednesdays, next to the interfaith dinners and MARTI outreach that came before it.
Long table
shared tables · recurring invitations
Interfaith Dinners
Every hand on this banner belongs to someone who showed up. The gatherings behind it include iftars with JHU Hillel and JHUMA, an iftar at Oseh Shalom, and a program on service in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that MARTI hosted, with delegates and state senators on the invite list.
JHU Interfaith Iftar
An iftar co-hosted by JHUMA and MARTI, both named on the organizers slide. Speeches at the floor mic, tower-building races between the tables, and a full hall breaking fast together.
Thanksgiving Community Gathering
Another kind of shared table. Thanksgiving with a decorated room, a full meal, and an open invitation.
Robot corner
a shared basement lab · embodied AI
House of Nur: Basement Lab
The basement robotics and electronics lab of the House of Nur, the eight-person JHU hacker house. Prototypes, robots, and shared projects live on the same bench.
SO-101 Robot Arms
A paired manipulation platform for teleoperation, demonstrations, and embodied-learning experiments, moving here in the basement lab.
Building the SO-101 Arms
Assembly shots and motion footage from the paired robot-arm platform used for teleoperation and embodied-learning experiments.
Memory-SmolVLA
A temporal memory module grafted onto the SmolVLA vision-language-action model, using mid-layer representation caching with learned gated fusion. Long-horizon LIBERO-10 success rose from 72% to 76%, with 88.75% overall on LIBERO against the base paper's 87.3%.
Outreach wall
invite · organize · follow through
MARTI Community Food Drive
The unglamorous half of community work: donated food to sort and volunteers to coordinate.
Also shown here: The School in Dar es Salaam.
Also in the archive
Magoroto View Point
Magoroto View Point, on the Tanzania trip. A hand-cut steel sign, wet boards, and the hills above the coast. The fundraiser is what put him on this side of the world.
The Attic
The person the projects come from lives up here.
Postcards from Egypt, Rome, the Netherlands, Germany, and Madinah; skis, a telescope, and Arabic flashcards; the publication shelf (CSCW '26, Memory-SmolVLA, SPDF, Constitutional AI); and a screening corner for three YouTube channels.
Hobbies
postcards · skis · a telescope · Arabic flashcards
Cairo, Egypt
The oldest engineering on the itinerary. Some structures ship without documentation and last five thousand years.
Tanzania
The trip behind the school campaign. A jungle lake on a rest day, between work days in Dar es Salaam.
The School in Dar es Salaam
Inside the school the $12,000 campaign repaired. Students in uniform, mid-lesson, the reason the fundraiser existed. The Side Quests board downstairs tells the money side; this is the room it built.
Also shown here: Ski Trip, Space Observatory Visit.
Publications
papers · frameworks · early writing
Constitutional AI Principles
Early writing on what a machine should promise the people it serves: transparency before capability, and the user keeps the last word.
Also shown here: CrossWeave Feed, Memory-SmolVLA, SPDF: Secure Product Development Framework, Artificial Intelligence Today.
Screening corner
three channels · robotics films · reflections
The State of AI Today
The AI Today research, turned into a video for people who would never read the paper.
iPad Pro 2020 Review
A student's-perspective tech review, and early practice at explaining hardware honestly.
Aliens, Jinn & Ancient Archeology
The reflective channel, reading ancient texts and ancient sites side by side.
Do You Feel Secure?
A short reflection on security: the feeling, not the checklist.
Also shown here: VEX Robotics Team 6460.