builder. creator. connector.
hi, i'm ponita! cs junior at the university of michigan. i love building things, whether that's shipping products at a hackathon, growing a community, or just experimenting with ideas. i have a technical side and a creative side, and i like using both.
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FaceTime your AI dad to fix issues in your apartment. Point your camera at whatever's broken and get real-time, step-by-step repair guidance from a three-stage LLM pipeline. Gemini 2.0 Flash for vision, two Llama 3.3 70B models via Groq for reasoning and repair plans. FAISS vector search keeps every instruction grounded in actual repair documentation.
If Reddit and ChatGPT had a baby. An AI community Q&A platform that uses semantic search to find if your question's already been asked, so nothing gets repeated and every token counts. Shipped a working prototype in 36 hours. Won first place out of 383 participants competing for $39K+ in prizes.
Full-stack nutrition tracking app for UMich dining halls. Built the backend a Node.js ETL pipeline processing 10,000+ data points from the MDining dataset with real-time updates and 99.7% uptime across a full academic semester.
Co-founded an AI career coaching platform that analyzes resumes and identifies skill gaps for specific job targets. Ran 30+ user interviews, discovered the original idea wasn't quite right, and pivoted to something that actually solved the problem. Won the $4,000 Andrew Sutherland '94 Award at UMass Lowell's DifferenceMaker Challenge.
I get sponsors on board, recruit judges, and promoting JacHacks on LinkedIn and Instagram. It's a hackathon by Jaseci Labs where 200+ hackers build with Jac, a pythonic AI-native language that unifies frontend, backend, and AI in one file. Backed by NVIDIA and the National Science Foundation. $10K+ in prizes.
· A LinkedIn post went viral and got strangers to fly me to San Francisco. Series B founders, YC-backed startups & Founders, and an Entrepreneur First investor reached out after seeing it. That's the kind of reach I'm interested in building. · Experimenting with my own @ponitaty presence, and actively growing my LinkedIn to build my personal brand. Reach through authenticity, not ads. ↳ Viral reel reached almost 5 million views and a few hundred thousand views on other reels. · Grew @derryfield.robotics 5× through strategic content creation. Scaled 200 → 1000 followers.
posted on LinkedIn asking someone to fund my trip to the YC × Google DeepMind hackathon. as a first-gen student from cambodia, i didn't expect my life to change overnight. Series B startups, YC-backed founders, an Entrepreneur First investor — they all reached out. they pitched in, flew me out, covered accommodation. what started as a post turned into coffee chats, office tours, new friends, and a week that changed everything. it all started with my first hackathon at MHacks. the rest is history.
when i'm not building, i'm reading a classic novel or traveling somewhere new by myself. i try to do at least one solo travel trip a year because it keeps me present, observant, inspired by new experiences/ideas, and better at collaborating when i come back.