Simon Mahns

Passionate about AI, Robotics, and creating great things.

Chicago, IL

Languages:

Python

Golang

Typescript

Javascript

C++

Bash

Tools:

NumPy

Pandas

PyTorch

AutoCAD

AWS

GCloud

Databases

Linux

Simon Mahns (for seo) - picture of me (website theme (#ed9b5b) is sampled from the sunset of this image)

All interests, languages, and skills visualized over time (click an image to expand). See the raw data or code.

Months spent per interest (net, lifetime)

Months spent per language (net, lifetime)

Experiences

Company	Role	Dates	Tags
Argonne National Lab	Undergraduate Researcher	02/24-Present	Robotics Research	▿
⚬ Self Driving Laboratories, building end-to-end experiment orchestration, execution, and iteration.
SIGMA Research Lab	Undergraduate Researcher	10/23-Present	AI/ML Research	▿
⚬ Reasoning capabilities and self-play mechanics of Large Language Models. ⚬ Working at the UChicago Strategic Intelligence for Machine Agents (SIGMA) Research Lab (Prof. Haifeng Xu).
Distributed Systems	Founding Engineer	09/22-01/24	Backend	▿
⚬ Led development, deployment and maintenance of a Fintech startup’s core infrastructure that supports millions of end-users, $41B+ in volume, and the Synapse Network. Joined as 7th employee. ⚬ Engineered a cutting-edge transaction indexer/internal data lake, RPC aggregator, RFQ System, and GraphQL APIs (datalake, analytics) for 19 chains and 900+ contracts, handling billions of data points and millions of inserts/reads a day. ⚬ Achieved $60k/month savings by creating caching methods in every layer of the stack and optimizing SQL queries. ⚬ Built and deployed a Next.js support site with ≈500 Daily Active Users (DAU), improving support workflow by 90%. ⚬ Led team of engineers to rebuild the company’s primary webapp (≈7k DAU/≈$10M daily vol) and SDK (≈200 weekly installs). ⚬ ≈500k lines of code contributed. Took 1.5 years of leave from school to work full-time.
Meta	Data Engineer Intern	06/22-09/22	Data	▿
⚬ Wrote C++ logging software for Oculus IMUs and deployed Python/SQL data aggregation pipelines with user data that identified performance bottlenecks ⚬ Led analysis that led to hardware revisions in future Oculus remotes. ⚬ -- ⚬ This was my second internship at Meta. In 2021 I analyzed data from bad actors, specifically groups and pages removed for violating Facebook policy. Began development of a prediction engine with this data as part of a side project.
Baryl	Founding Engineer	09/21-05/22	AI/ML Backend	▿
⚬ Acquired in fall 2022. ⚬ Led development for an AI travel planning platform. Built a recommendation system notably leveraging collaborative filtering, LLMs, NLP, and vector quantization. ⚬ Deployed data scraping pipelines for 100+ websites. Managed and trained a team of three frontend developers. ⚬ 2022 Polsky CNVC Finalist (awarded $6k), semi-finalist and People’s Choice award at U.Pitch 2021.
CSIL	System Administrator	03/21-03/22	Backend	▿
⚬ Built an internal employee scheduling system (Django), administered Ubuntu server security, configured NAS, build the CSIL website, and managed a tutor desk.
MIIE Research Lab	Undergraduate Researcher	10/19-09/21	AI/ML Research	▿
⚬ Wrote NLP and OCR scripts for data analysis, engineered bots to scrape thousands of digitized books (and their metadata) across hundreds of websites - constructing 99% of the lab's dataset, built internal tools for manual data labeling, created the lab's website + logo. ⚬ Listed as an "Invaluable Contributor" on "What We Teach About Race and Gender: Representation in Images and Text of Children’s Books", first place poster prize at APPAM 2021.
AMR	EMT	09/18-05/19		▿
⚬ Writing reports, patient care, equipment maintenance, and ambulance operation. Required to complete various trainings and maintain numerous certifications (NREMT, CPR/BLS, etc.). ⚬ Nominated for the star of life.

Awards

Place	Item	Award	Notes
Third	College New Venture Challenge 2023	$10,000	Co-Founder	▿
Built and designed entire product MVP (populus.fund) with AWS and Next.js. Created pitch, GTM plan, determined PMF, etc.
First	Techstars AR 2022 - Web3 track	$5,000	Hacker	▿
Built and designed entire platform (Move) with React.js. Wrote and deployed smart contracts on Polygon Mainnet.
First	Lion Hacks 2022 - DAO Track	$4,000	Hacker	▿
Built and deployed a decentralized organization management platform with AWS, React, and Solidity (Populus).
Fourth	College New Venture Challenge 2022	$6,000	Co-Founder	▿
Designed and built full stack MVP (Baryl) with Python and React. Designed pitch and GTM, PMF, runway, etc. with co-founders.
Second	Sacramento Hacks 2021	-	Hacker	▿
Built and designed a mobile application to provide resources to the unhoused or those in need of basic aid in Sacramento.
First	Uncommon Hacks 2020 - Google Cloud	-	Hacker	▿
A mobile application using computer vision to detect types of food and retrieve nutritional information. Tracked nutritional data w/a custom API and MongoDB for nutritional goal tracking.
First	Hack Harvard 2019	-	Hacker	▿
Built a Chrome extension to make it easier to find activism events and groups. Admitted to and competed in the MIT IDEAS 2022 Spring Cohort.

Education

The University of Chicago - Exp 2024
B.S. Computer Science, Astrophysics Minor

▿

Projects

Name	Year	Tags
Astrophysics Llama	2024	AI/ML	▿
To get some hands-on experience with DPO (Direct Preference Optimization), I investigate the performance of llama2-13b-chat and its academic performance in my astrophysics class. This experiment involved doing an initial benchmark - testing the base model with 20 questions selected from quizzes and assignments from class. The base model was then fine tuned for 2500 steps with 10000 rows of “paired” Q/A data from the Astronomy Stack exchange with DPO and LoRA. After fine tuning, the new model was tested with the same benchmark for evaluation. This process saw a 91% increase in performance post fine tuning, and performed 13% better than gpt3. Each benchmark for each model was run three times, responses were handgraded by myself, and scores were averaged over the three runs. While this improvement is cool, the model would not pass the class (still only answers around 50% of the questions correctly). The fine tuned llama model (hugging face).
Open Source Contributions	2023	AI/ML Web	▿
By no means would I consider myself an open source contributor, but here are some small contributions that I did in 2023. DefiLlama, Hugging Face TRL.
This Website	2023	Web	▿
This website lol. Next.js, TypeScript, Vercel, Tailwind CSS. All data loaded from a json so its easy to update.
ChicagoDAO	2022	Fullstack Blockchain Leadership Non-profit	▿
ChicagoDAO was an experimental decentralized autonomous organization co-founded with students at the University of Chicago (the Business School, the Law School, and the College). ⚬ Secured $24M in governance tokens from A16Z and Standard Crypto. ⚬ Led ChicagoDAO’s hackathon team, netting in over $16,000+ in awards.
Pool	2021	Backend Entrepreneurship	▿
Led development for a mobile marketplace. Designed and built a robust backend with DynamoDB, Golang and AWS Lambda. Recruited talented devs.
Spott	2019	Backend Mobile Entrepreneurship	▿
Created company’s website with React and Three.js. Wrote Swift code to improve mobile application’s onboarding flow. Contributed to backend architecture with Golang.
ORION	2017-2019	Robotics Fullstack Leadership Non-profit	▿
ORION (Omnified Resources for Innovation and Cognition) was a nonprofit I founded in High School to fund my FTC robotics team. ORION’s scope quickly grew beyond this initial case after receiving grants from Walmart and United Therapeutics. During my 2 year tenure as its president, ORION achieved the following: ⚬ Founded a robotics initiative in Accra, Ghana (with local nonprofit STEMBees). Created curriculum and led classes. ⚬ Founded a robotics initiative in Santa Domingo, DR (with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab). Created curriculum and led classes. ⚬ Funded and mentored two robotics teams. ⚬ Founded a maker space in Frederick, MD. See a comprehensive overview of the entity.
Biking to Alaska	2019	Fullstack	▿
Created a fullstack blog (w/CDN) while doing a solo bike trip to Anchorage, AK from Baltimore, MD. Spent the 6 months previous saving money working as an EMT and Waiter in Baltimore, MD. Trip took 74 days. Later added more adventures and Three.js components, which can be seen here. Some pics
FITCI Innovation Booth	2019	Robotics Autodesk	▿
Responsible for creating the FITCI accelerator's makerspace booth at the FITCI 15 year anniversary. Created the following: a drone built from scratch, a table-edge-detecting autonomous robot, a tweet bot using a raspberry pi, a glowing FITCI sign (3D printed/arduino), a couple arduino based games, a few hundred CADed/printed keychains for the event. Final booth setup
Freelancing	2017-2019	Fullstack	▿
Some Freelancing work here and there (portfolio). One of the main ways I learned how to program.
FTC 2018	2018	Robotics Autodesk	▿
Team captain and head engineer. Created CAD designs in autodesk. Designed and built the team's robot. Awarded the “Connect Award” in the DC Eastern Region. Meeting Logs.
FTC 2017	2017	Robotics Autodesk	▿
Founded a FIRST Tech Challenge robotics team. Served as Team Captain, Coach, and Head of Engineering. Designed and built an omni-directional robot. Used AutoDesk inventor to design the robot's components. Competed in the Maryland Region Championship. Dean’s List Finalist. Meeting logs. Benny (The robot), myself, and the homies
Fractal Renderer	2017	Python	▿
My first Python project: A fractal renderer. UI
FLL 2012	2012	Robotics	▿
Team captain and head engineer, qualified and competed in the 2012 International FLL tournament representing the United States and the state of Alaska.