Shiza Charania
My life revolves around finding the optimal policy for my perceived reward function.
Currently, this has manifested in the form of giving robots feelings (tactile sensing) @ midas robotics
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