Shiza Charania
My life revolves around finding the optimal policy for my perceived reward function.
Currently, this has manifested in the form of haptics, humanoids (specifically dexterous manipulation), and other fascinating electromechanical engineering problems.
PREVIOUSLY
I was part of 1X's joints and body team, where I built test rigs and led material design + testing for Neo's soft compliant outer shells. I also worked at a hardware consulatancy company on the mechanical design of aluminum air battery filtration systems.
Before getting nerdsniped by hardware, I spent a few years on computer vision (specifically medical imaging) research, analyzing brain tumours from MRI scans. I also did some mechanistic interp research with sycophancy emergence in LLMs.
SOME FACTS ABOUT ME
- stood inside an operating room for 8 hours, watching neurosurgeons perform a Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) implant surgery
- planning to build an escape room this year as a standardized robotics benchmark for dexterity + reasoning
- had a pet parrot, chicks, and rabbit growing up. also had multiple pet fish but my brother kept forgetting to feed them, so I built a robotic fish for him
- addicted to puzzles and board games, especially harmonies, coup, & sea, salt, and paper
- born in Pakistan, lived in Dubai for 5 years of my life (which is why I wanted to be an architect for the longest time, obsessed with Frank Gehry's work)
- collect coins, I have a 12 sided nickel that's worth $2k
- went to kenya for a month as a service trip - some learnings here
- a few years back, when I couldn't understand any ML/CV research papers, I started my own Youtube series "Reading Research Papers at 1am" - used Feynman's technique to the point that I explained a causality RL architecture with legos