khal
Kaleb Aklilu
I build in robotics, automation, and backend systems, things that make people and your business more capable.
01 // ABOUT
The Engineer
Behind the Machine
I'm Kaleb 👋🏾, a Computer Science student at Johns Hopkins University, minoring in Robotics, Computer-Integrated Surgery, and Entrepreneurship & Management. I'm doing it as an accelerated combined bachelor's and master's in Data Science and Computer Science, all in four years, graduating May 2028.
On the Computer Science side I'm focused on Human Language Technology. On the Data Science side I'm building scalable, reliable machine learning, deep learning, and reinforcement learning systems. It's a lot to juggle, but I just like challenging myself.
I started building at 15, running a small startup with a friend, and never really stopped. Lately I've been all in on Embodied AI, VLAs especially. I think it's going to be one of the next big leaps forward, and I want to be one of the people who helped build it.
Transfer learning to adapt pretrained models to a specific task, from classification and regression to generation and tokenizing time series signals
Worked on optimal control, reinforcement learning and reasoning models for autonomous guidance and navigation at Lockheed Martin
Wrote the multi-threaded DAQ server that pulls spill data off FPGA boards for the SpinQuest experiment at Fermilab
Data engineering and large scale data processing, including distributed scraping pipelines that collected 100 million articles across 20 servers
Assist two courses at Hopkins right now, Artificial Intelligence and Physics 2
02 // PROJECTS
Things I've Shipped
A few of my favorites. Each one has its own page with the full story.
Financial News Market Prediction Pipeline
100 million financial news articles scraped across 20 servers and filtered down to 2 million, then run through everything from a fine-tuned FinBERT to attention-based time series networks to try to call where a stock was going.
High-Throughput DAQ Server & FPGA Simulator
The data acquisition server for the SpinQuest experiment at Fermilab, built to catch spill data off multiple FPGA boards at once, plus the fake FPGA it gets tested against.
ML Playground
Machine learning and NLP implemented from scratch, from decision trees and PageRank to n-gram language models, plus Argubots: LLM agents that debate using real argumentation data.
03 // EXPERIENCE
Where I've Worked
// ROLES OVER TIME
up to 6 at once
Course Assistant, Artificial Intelligence
Johns Hopkins Whiting School of EngineeringGuide undergraduate and graduate students through the fundamentals of AI and machine learning: supervised and unsupervised learning, neural network design, computer vision, NLP, and reinforcement learning. Run discussion sections and office hours, and grade assignments, projects, and exams.
Using control theory, reinforcement learning, and game theory to solve guidance and navigation problems for autonomous systems.
Mentor high school students who want to go into engineering, helping them with college applications, academic prep, and the path into top programs. Gather what members of the local chapter care about and bring it to regional and national senate meetings.
Built an automated scraper (85% success rate) that gathered over 2 million financial news articles from Google News and BigQuery's Global News Knowledge Graph, stripping ads and boilerplate from the raw HTML. Embedded the articles with Doc2Vec and filtered them with a similarity function to keep only the relevant ones. Fine-tuned a 250 million parameter FinBERT model and a few others, replacing their final layers to predict from the news text data. Benchmarked models from decision trees to attention-based time series networks forecasting returns for 10 tech stocks, then adapted the scraper, with rotating proxies, fingerprint-randomized profiles, and automated CAPTCHA solving, to forecast crude oil prices during the US-Iran conflict. Struggled to beat a random baseline or the S&P 500, but learned a lot.
Building a high-throughput data acquisition system for the SpinQuest particle physics experiment. Built a multi-threaded server from the ground up that ingests TCP, UDP, and UNIX socket streams from FPGA boards during accelerator spills, plus a load-testing FPGA simulator with lock-free SO_REUSEPORT load balancing across worker threads.
Lead discussion and review sessions to help students understand electromagnetism and modern physics. Hold office hours for one on one support, exam review sessions, and homework prep.
Built an automated tool from scratch that catches users abusing a flaw in the system, sharing one account across multiple cars parked at once. Optimized it with an advanced greedy algorithm, a sorted two pointer scan, so it scales to millions of transactions in a reasonable amount of time. It also flags plate to account mismatches and writes a violation report so management can see who's abusing the system.
Provided virtual, small group tutoring in mathematics, breaking down difficult math and physics concepts into manageable steps and adapting my teaching style to fit each student's needs.
04 // SKILLS
Technical Arsenal
A full stack of capabilities, from low level robotics firmware to production ML systems.
AI & Machine Learning
Robotics & Embodied AI
Currently LearningLanguages & Frameworks
Systems & Software
Databases
Currently LearningNetworks & Infrastructure
05 // TOOLS
What I Build With
Hover for what it is, click through to its site or repo.
ML, Data & RL
Web Scraping & Data Engineering
Backend & Infra
Hardware & Edge
Languages & Low-Level
Dev Environment
06 // COURSEWORK
Relevant Course Log
Coursework I've completed and what I took away from each.
Artificial Intelligence
Johns Hopkins University
Situates the study of Artificial Intelligence within the broader context of Cognitive Science, then covers principles and methods for reasoning, planning, and learning, including both conventional and deep learning approaches.
CSE Multivariable Calculus and Vector Analysis
University of Minnesota
Covers the derivative as a linear map, differential and integral calculus of functions of several variables including change of coordinates using Jacobians, line and surface integrals, and the theorems of Gauss, Green, and Stokes.
Classical Mechanics I
Johns Hopkins University
An in-depth introduction to classical mechanics for physics majors/minors and other students with a strong interest in physics, treating fewer topics than the general physics sequence but with greater mathematical sophistication.
Computational Linear Algebra
University of Minnesota
Covers matrices and linear transformations, linear vector spaces and inner product spaces, systems of linear equations, eigenvalues and singular values, and computational matrix methods using software such as MATLAB.
Computer System Fundamentals
Johns Hopkins University
Covers modern computer systems from a software perspective: binary data representation, machine arithmetic, assembly language, computer architecture, performance optimization, memory hierarchy, virtual memory, Unix systems programming, networking, and concurrency.
Databases
Johns Hopkins University
Introduces database management systems and database design: the relational and object-oriented data models, query languages and query optimization, transaction processing, parallel and distributed databases, recovery and security, and data mining.
Discrete Structures of Computer Science
University of Minnesota
Covers the foundations of discrete mathematics for computer science: sets, sequences, functions, big-O notation, propositional and predicate logic, proof methods, counting methods, recursion and recurrences, relations, and graph fundamentals.
Electricity and Magnetism Laboratory
Johns Hopkins University
Laboratory experiments chosen to complement the Electricity and Magnetism lecture course, introducing students to experimental techniques and statistical analysis.
General Physics II
Johns Hopkins University
The second semester of a calculus-based general physics sequence, covering wave motion, electricity and magnetism, optics, and modern physics.
Information Extraction
Johns Hopkins University
A graduate-level course covering techniques for automatically extracting structured information from unstructured text and other data sources, including named entity recognition, relation extraction, and template filling, with emphasis on statistical and machine learning approaches.
Information Retrieval and Web Agents
Johns Hopkins University
An in-depth, hands-on study of current information retrieval techniques and their application to intelligent web agents: document retrieval models, clustering, automatic indexing, query expansion, relevance feedback, and search-engine-scale IR issues.
Intermediate Programming
Johns Hopkins University
Teaches intermediate to advanced programming using C and C++: low-level programming techniques alongside object-oriented class design, pointers, dynamic memory allocation, polymorphism, inheritance, templates, collections, and exceptions.
Intro Algorithm
Johns Hopkins University
Concentrates on the design of algorithms and rigorous analysis of their efficiency: worst-case and average-case complexity, dynamic programming, sorting, searching, selection, and advanced data structures.
Introduction to Algorithms and Data Structures
University of Minnesota
Covers advanced object-oriented programming to implement abstract data types (stacks, queues, linked lists, hash tables, binary trees) in Java, including inheritance, searching/sorting algorithms, and basic algorithmic analysis.
Introduction to Computing and Programming Concepts
University of Minnesota
Introduces fundamental principles of computer science and programming, emphasizing problem solving and computing with data, using Python to implement solutions to a broad range of computational problems.
Introduction to Data Science
Johns Hopkins University
A thorough survey of data science methods balancing theory and application: supervised methods for regression and classification (regression, kNN, SVM, decision trees, random forests) and unsupervised methods (PCA, K-means, Gaussian mixtures), using Python and SQL.
Introduction to Probability and Statistics
University of Minnesota
An introductory statistics course covering elementary probability theory and an introduction to statistical inference, including testing, estimation, and confidence statements.
Machine Learning for Medical Applications
Johns Hopkins University
Covers basic principles of AI and machine learning applied to medicine, including biosignals (EEG, ECG) and medical imaging, culminating in a final project applying these techniques to a real-world medical problem.
Machine Learning: Deep Learning
Johns Hopkins University
Covers deep learning as a tool for data-intensive learning problems (supervised learning, dimensionality reduction, and control), with applications in speech, text, computer vision, medical imaging, and robotics.
Machine Learning: Reinforcement Learning
Johns Hopkins University
Covers both classical reinforcement learning and its modern counterparts behind results from AlphaGo to LLMs: Markov decision processes, dynamic programming, model-based and model-free RL, temporal difference learning, and Monte Carlo methods.
Machine Translation
Johns Hopkins University
Explores how systems like Google Translate convert text between languages, why translation systems make certain kinds of errors, and how modern translation systems learn from millions of words of already-translated text.
Mathematical Foundations for Computer Science
Johns Hopkins University
Introduces mathematical reasoning and discrete structures relevant to computer science: logic, proof techniques, sets, relations, functions, recurrences, counting, asymptotic analysis, discrete probability, graphs, and trees.
Natural Language Processing
Johns Hopkins University
An in-depth introduction to core techniques for analyzing, transforming, and generating human language, spanning linguistics, modeling, algorithms, and applications.
Natural Language Processing for Computational Social Science
Johns Hopkins University
Explores how NLP can be used to understand social phenomena that manifest in text, such as toxicity, discrimination, and propaganda, combining text-analysis methodology with statistical methods like time series analysis and causal inference.
Natural Language Processing: Self-Supervised Models
Johns Hopkins University
A thorough introduction to the self-supervised (pre-trained) learning techniques that have transformed NLP, with students designing, implementing, and understanding their own self-supervised neural network models in PyTorch.
Parallel Computing & Performance Engineering
Johns Hopkins University
Studies parallelism in data science, from instruction-level parallelism and shared-memory multicore computing to distributed computing and data-parallel frameworks like Dask, Spark, and Ray, drawing examples from data analytics and machine learning.
Regression and Statistical Computing
University of Minnesota
A second statistics course teaching students to analyze data using multiple linear regression (inference, diagnostics, validation, transformations, and model selection) and to design Monte Carlo simulation studies.
Research and Design in Applied Mathematics: Data Mining
Johns Hopkins University
A project-oriented course focused on practical applications of machine learning and data mining, in which teams of students work throughout the semester on topics chosen jointly with the instructor.
Probability & Statistics for Machine Learning & Data Science
DeepLearning.AI · Issued May 2026
Covers probability theory, common distributions, hypothesis testing, and statistical inference, the foundations used to reason about uncertainty in ML models.
Credential ID: P0XVJJRBCHM2
Calculus for Machine Learning and Data Science
DeepLearning.AI · Issued Nov 2025
Covers derivatives, gradients, and multivariable calculus, building the optimization intuition behind gradient descent and how ML models actually learn.
Credential ID: VLFXILPABP1Y
Linear Algebra for Machine Learning and Data Science
DeepLearning.AI · Issued Sep 2025
Covers vectors, matrices, eigenvalues, and linear transformations, the math underneath how data and model weights are actually represented and manipulated.
Credential ID: 7WFA7H8PGYR4
07 // CONTACT
Let's Build Something
Whether it's a collaboration, a question, or just a conversation about the future of Embodied AI, I'm always open.
Contact Me
Happy to talk about ML Engineering, Robotics, or Embodied AI, whether that is a project, a collaboration, or just a question.