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.jsReactTypeScriptOpenAI
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.
PythonPyTorchTensorFlowXGBoostscikit-learnMNElibrosapyprepTensorPACNumPySciPypandas
Read paper · Code
2025 Question Video Explainer: A 5-agent pipeline that turns questions into animated explainer videos with voiceover. Planning → code generation → self-correction → rendering → evaluation.
PythonOpenAIOpenRouterManimmanim-voiceovergTTSFFmpegLaTeXOpenCVNumPy
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.
PythonGeminiPerplexityDeepgramTwilioKafkaSingleStoreSQLAlchemySeleniumPhoenix
Code · Devpost
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.
PythonPyTorchYOLOFastAPIFirebaseGeminiGoogle MapsKaggleGoogle Cloud
Code · Devpost · Live demo
2024 TagAlong: Built at LA Hacks 2024. AI-powered matching for local activities — making community connection more accessible.
PythonGeminiChromaDBFastAPIFirebaseFetch.aiTogether.aiuAgents
Code · Devpost
2022 El Pollo Loco: Built at MIT Blueprint 2022. A 2D platformer with tilemap navigation and collectibles — my first hackathon.
Phaser 3JavaScriptWebpackTiledHTML
Code