Alexander George Padula

Designed a system to generate novel board games in a DSL using a LLM as a mutation operator. Automated evaluation through play-through sampling between general game-playing agents, with heuristics to score runs.

For my BSc thesis, I explored whether existing PPO implementations designed for RLHF could instead train LLMs using rewards from explicitly programmed functions - e.g., quantifying if a generated program is efficient and correct.

Authored an internal paper on code generation. Presented research to 60+ employees, gaining traction across departments with the potential to impact the next product cycle. Learned how to share complex ideas concisely.

Developed Game Smith, a coding assistant for the Ludii DSL. Trained a LLM and overcame data scarcity using constrained decoding; developed a compiler for incomplete code that could mask illegal tokens during inference.

Covered tuition and rent by serving as a university teaching assistant and tutoring privately in computer science.

Built web interface currently used by glaucoma patients and their doctors to manage data and view test results. Worked with founders and dev team. Limited technical debt and managed state across complex React applications.

Built and deployed a content-based image search engine. Mentored by Dr. Bolioli’s team, I trained BERT and Inception V3 to embed images and descriptions in a shared latent space. This project underpinned my high school thesis.

Worked in the dev team of a mobile digital payment application. Debugged Node.js API and built a prototype in React. Operated in a large codebase and loved working in a team. Received an offer to return and a recommendation letter.

Debugged vision testing software and developed therapeutic VR game in Unity C# for amblyopia patients.

Designed novel data-passthrough joints and contributed to a ML model for inferring a modular robot’s configuration.

Built 3D printer and transformed it into a DIY laser cutter. Developed the open-source Python library svg-to-gcode. The tool’s GUI has garnered over 13,000 downloads and a community that helps maintain it.