About me

Hi, I'm Colton. I'm an aspiring ML engineer passionate about learning and building tools that matter. I graduated from UCSB in 2024 with degrees in Statistics and Mathematics, and from UCLA in 2025 with a M.Eng in AI. On my free time, I like going on hikes, learning new math, and playing trading card games.

Projects

CardPond: Live Data Analytics for MTG Decks

Apr 2026 - Present

Django, SentenceTransformers, UMAP-Learn, Python, JS, HTML/CSS

Developed a full-stack Django web application into production hosted on Sevalla with a PostgreSQL database. App clusters and visualizes card text using SentenceTransformers and UMAP dimensionality reduction.

Time Travel Sand Lab

Jan 2025 - Sept 2025

Love2d, Lua

An interactive sandbox toy with time reversal mechanics.

Agentic Data Sanitizer

May 2025 - August 2025

FastAPI, Python, HTML, Javascript

Developed a full-stack data loss prevention framework through a Chrome extension with a FastAPI backend. LLM-based agents increased redaction scope and accuracy over traditional regex methods. Communicated with company leadership to scope and deliver the finished product.

sEMG Keystroke Decoding

Jan 2025 - Mar 2025

Pytorch

Compared CNN, RNN, and LSTM hybrid models for keystroke decoding from sEMG using Stable-Baselines3. Found that the baseline CNN model outperformed the hybrid models, achieving a character error rate of 21.82.

Metadrive Autonomous Driving

Jan 2025 - Mar 2025

Pytorch, Stable-Baselines3, Metadrive

Used proximal policy optimization to train autonomous driving agents in Metadrive environments. Maximized route completion while tuning hyperparameters like scenario count, clip range, and reward shaping. The best agent achieved 88% route completion and 70% success rate.

Network Pruning with Data Selection

Sept 2024 - Dec 2024

Pytorch, CREST

Investigated how coreset data selection effects lottery ticket one-shot neural network pruning. Trained ResNet and LeNet models on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets over hyperparameters including post-pruning epochs and prune-percent. The fine-tuned models maintained 2% higher accuracy after 10 epochs, suggesting coreset selection reveals structural patterns.

TV and Movie Popularity Prediction

Apr 2023 - Jun 2023

Python, Streamlit

Built a predictive web app using Streamlit and Scikit-learn to estimate IMDb ratings, enabling users to input show attributes and receive a predicted popularity score. Scraped and parsed thousands of entries from Kaggle and IMDb, and engineered features to train a random forest, KNN, decision tree, and beta regression with an RMSE ≈ .197.

Time Series Forecasting of Global Temperature

Jan 2023 - Mar 2023

R

Applied autoregressive models such as SARIMA and TAR to global temperature data spanning 100 years. Forecasted global mean temperature over the next 80 years to identify climate trends.

Set Prediction using Machine Learning

Jan 2023 - Mar 2023

Python, SQL

Used hyperparameter tuning and cross-validation to compare an Elastic Net, Decision Tree, Random Forest, and Boosted Tree in predicting Super Smash Bros. match outcomes. Highlighted that stage selection and player performance history were more predictive than character choice alone through variable importance, achieving an accuracy of 67.8% with a Random Forest model.

Rewordle

Jan 2022 - Mar 2023

HTML, CSS

A "Wordle"-like web game with a twist.