Sahil Ashar

I'm a senior at The University of Texas at Austin, studying Electrical and Computer Engineering, with a focus in Distributed Computing, Systems Engineering, and Software Engineering.

I'm currently working as the Lead Systems Engineer for the Avionics, Guidance, Navigation, and Control (AvGNC) team at the Texas Rocket Engineering Lab (TREL). TREL is a research focused, rocketry start-up based in Austin, Texas, with the primary goal of getting a liquid, bipropellant rocket to the edge of space by 2021.

I'm also currently a Machine Learning Intern at KUNGFU.AI, an AI consulting firm that helps companies establish their AI strategy and develop custom solutions.

I most recently worked at Riot Games as an Systems Software Engineering Intern, and helped write an article about my experiences on the Riot Games Tech Blog! You can check out more about my current internship, past internships, and other related things on my resume.

At UT, I'm a member the Student Engineering Council, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers; I'm also mildly involved in studying legislation concerning the University.

In my free time, I enjoy drinking tea, solving Rubik's cubes, playing saxophone, and eating too much Taco Bell. At any given time you can find me at my desk, either playing video games or building one.

The Alito Index

Justice Samuel Alito is one of the most pro-corporate justices in the Supreme Court, paving the way for better tax and social benefits for them while not being as friendly to most middle class Americans.

We hypothesized - what if there was a way to tell, based on the make-up of Congress in a specific cycle, if the market would react a specific way? More specifically, would the make-up of the Congressional class, in relation to have similar physical features as Justice Samuel Alito, have an effect on the market and its trends?

We analyzed over 3.6k individual photos of 6 Congressional classes. Using the Microsoft Azure Facial Recognition API, we were able to classify each Congress member - and thereby each Congressional class - and assign them an 'Alito Index' based on their similarity to Justice Alito. Then, using Goldman Sach's Marquee API, we were able to pull 5 years of financial data for 100 different securities, and attempt to find a correlation between specific securities/industries and a Congressional class.

Check out our Devpost for more in-depth info about this project.

Space

Space is a multi-level arcade game, adapted from the classic Space Invaders. Space was built for use on the Texas Instruments TM4C123G Microcontroller, with a codebase of primarily C and ARM Assembly. Unfortunately, Space is not recreatable, due to the amount of custom wiring done for the ADC, DAC, and UART systems.

Dallas Ramen Guide

Dallas Ramen Guide is an Amazon Alexa Skill thats allows the user to discover new ramen places around Dallas. When prompted, the user can ask Alexa for "an overview of Dallas Ramen", or the "top five ramen restaurants", or they can ask for a "random ramen restuarant." Each invocation will give a description of the ramen restaurant in the Alexa App as well. Primarily developed in JavaScript.

MarkUp

MarkUp is a Google Chrome extension that helps students take notes and efficiently annotate and cite sources. Utilizes the EasyBib API and the Google Chrome API to help build citations. Primarily developed in HTML and JavaScript.