Building systems that perceive, move, and render.
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Where I've worked
Tech Consultant Intern
Worked with the team running the airport's baggage handling system on where machine learning could help a legacy Beumer Group installation. Reviewed the system documentation with six technical heads to find bottlenecks and gaps, built a roadmap aimed at better bag tag reading and fewer mishandled bags, and presented it to three of HIA's leadership.
Co-founder
A wearable cooling device for outdoor workers in Gulf heat, using Peltier modules to drop skin surface temperature by about 10°C. I handled the electronics and firmware: custom PCBs in KiCad, Arduino microcontrollers, and enough iteration on real feedback to get it ready for field testing. Won QBA's Most Valuable Product and Investors' Choice awards.
Software Engineering Intern
Upstream contributor to Swift, OpenStack's distributed object storage system, working in the public review process alongside the maintainers. Added byte-based quotas in Python so administrators can cap storage by data size rather than object count, and gave the account reaper daemon a recon heartbeat every 60 seconds so operators can see cleanup actually happening. Tested both against the Swift APIs in a VM, and iterated on community feedback with a team of five.
Lab Technician
Kept the inventory for a lab full of unfamiliar hardware: catalogued and sorted equipment, identified unlabelled devices from unsorted storage, read the documentation for each one, and ran basic functional tests to flag what no longer worked.
Course Assistant, 15-112
Course assistant for Carnegie Mellon's introductory programming course, with an assigned group of students I checked in with across the semester. Advised their term projects from proposal to submission, helping scope ideas to something buildable and debugging with them along the way, and explained recursion, data structures and objects to people seeing them for the first time.
Cybersecurity Research Assistant
On a project asking whether transformer models can pull structured threat intelligence out of cybersecurity reports. I built the tooling to evaluate that against the STIX standard, hand-encoded ground truth relations from source reports as the baseline, and ran the comparison to measure how closely the extracted relations matched.
Commentary Assistant
Stadium-side during the 2022 World Cup, setting up and checking commentary positions before matches and working with the Commentary Control Units to make sure each feed reached the right broadcaster. Live conditions, so problems had to be fixed before or during the broadcast.
MS in Computer Science
Computer Graphics, Vision and Robotics track.
BS in Computer Science, minor in Technology Entrepreneurship
assets/me.jpgPortrait, 4:5. Shown as dither, real photo on hover.Hi, I'm Daanish.
I studied computer science at Carnegie Mellon in Qatar, where I got hooked on systems you can see and touch: networked RC cars, a wearable cooling device I co-founded, and a gravity simulator written from scratch in OpenGL.
I'm now finishing my MS at Columbia in graphics, vision and robotics, and I'm looking for roles where software meets the physical world.
- Looking for
- Full-time roles in robotics, vision and graphics
- Graduating
- December 2026
- Based in
- New York