Steven Cao

Builder and researcher @ UCI

I love building things — there's something about watching an idea take shape and then seeing it flourish that feels like nurturing something alive.🌱

I study CS & math at UC Irvine, where I research perception and biometrics. Three published papers so far — identifying people from brainwaves, detecting brain injuries, improving fetal heart monitoring. I've interned at Meta through the MLH Fellowship and at Crusoe. I'm drawn to problems where the bottleneck isn't motivation or talent, but rather access.✦

You'll usually find me on a trail or writing about things I'm still figuring out.🌿

email · linkedin · github · google scholar

Things I've built:

Highlights

2024 — Notive: Won 1st place at UCI's AI Innovation Challenge. An AI note-taking app that captures lectures and generates study materials — making quality education tools accessible to all students.
Next.js React TypeScript OpenAI
Press: UCI News · ICS · Watch finals pitch

2022 — EEG Biometric Identification: Published in MDPI Sensors. A low-cost authentication system using brainwaves — proving secure identity doesn't require expensive hardware.
Python PyTorch TensorFlow XGBoost scikit-learn MNE librosa pyprep TensorPAC NumPy SciPy pandas
Read paper · Code

2025 — Crusoe Cloud: SWE Intern. A datacenter network path-tracing tool that traces end-to-end paths for AI workloads and flags source-of-truth vs live connectivity mismatches.
TCP/IP SNMP LLDP BGP Python Flask REST APIs React Postman NetBox Docker Kubernetes GKE ArgoCD
Crusoe Cloud

2024 — Geoflare: Won Best Use of Publicly Available Data Set at IrvineHacks 2024. Real-time wildfire response using computer vision — helping communities access critical risk data faster.
Python PyTorch YOLO FastAPI Firebase Gemini Google Maps Kaggle Google Cloud
Code · Devpost · Live demo

Other projects

2025 — Question Video Explainer: A 5-agent pipeline that turns questions into animated explainer videos with voiceover. Planning → code generation → self-correction → rendering → evaluation.
Python OpenAI OpenRouter Manim manim-voiceover gTTS FFmpeg LaTeX OpenCV NumPy
Code · Watch demo

Hackathon builds

2024 — LAILA: Built at Cal Hacks 11.0. An AI that turns natural language into automated web actions — giving everyone the power of automation.
Python Gemini Perplexity Deepgram Twilio Kafka SingleStore SQLAlchemy Selenium Phoenix
Code · Devpost

2024 — TagAlong: Built at LA Hacks 2024. AI-powered matching for local activities — making community connection more accessible.
Python Gemini ChromaDB FastAPI Firebase Fetch.ai Together.ai uAgents
Code · Devpost

2022 — El Pollo Loco: Built at MIT Blueprint 2022. A 2D platformer with tilemap navigation and collectibles — my first hackathon.
Phaser 3 JavaScript Webpack Tiled HTML
Code

Hover over a project to see details

Giving back:

I keep coming back to teaching and service because I remember what it felt like to not know — to be overwhelmed, unsure if I belonged. These roles aren't side projects; they shape how I think about building things that actually help people.

Oct 2023 — Present

Vice President of External Affairs

UCI Engineering Student Council

I remember being a freshman, overwhelmed by career fairs and not knowing how any of it worked. Now I run Engitech — the engineering track of UCI's largest career fair, connecting 65 companies with ove...

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Sep 2024 — June 2025

Learning Assistant

UCI Bren School of ICS

750+ students across two of the hardest courses in our CS curriculum — Data Structures and Algorithms. I'm in lecture answering questions in real-time, running review sessions before midterms, and res...

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Feb 2022 — June 2023

Program Director

InterSTEM

I grew up in a place with plenty of STEM opportunities. Not everyone does. So I created InspireToCode — an 8-week program teaching Java to kids who'd never written a line of code. I taught elementary ...

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