Brian PhanI like building things

Columbia MS student. I build machine learning systems, robots, and one E46 that opens my garage door.

Carbeetle

A BMW M3 E46 in Interlagos Blue, passed down from my father. It is also the reason a camera in my garage knows which car is mine.

The M3 badge on Brian's Interlagos Blue E46.

Engine: S54Inline six.
Intake: Karbonius CSL airboxThe CSL breathing setup.
Tune: Evolve Alpha-NAlpha-N, no mass airflow sensor.
Dyno: HTE dyno tuneTuned on the rollers, not by feel.
Result: 317.27 hpWhat the dyno actually printed.

The workbench

Software, machine learning, and the things with wires coming out of them.

Mar 2026 to present, robotics and edge AI

Iron Bark, autonomous VLA robot dog

A multithreaded perception pipeline combining YOLOv11 object detection, multi-shot ArcFace biometric enrollment, and a vision-language model across a distributed Pi 5 and GPU compute architecture.

Eliminated VLM hallucinations with YOLO-grounded prompting: real-time detection counts get injected into the VLM context.
Swapped LLaVA-7B for Moondream and cut latency 4.7x.
Behavior state machine, IDLE to FOLLOW to SEARCH to EXPLORE, with hysteresis-based transitions over a dual-camera edge system on ZeroMQ.

Jul 2025 to present, generative models

Rembeetle, real-time agentic voice platform

Sub-second bidirectional voice AI orchestrating Whisper ASR, GPT-4o, TTS, and Silero VAD, with retrieval-augmented memory on pgvector and tool calling over the Model Context Protocol.

Visit rembeetle.com

Oct 2024, AI and hardware

The Carbeetle Project

A YOLOv11 model on a Raspberry Pi watches a live camera feed, recognizes the family E46, and fires a relay to open the garage door on sight.

View on GitHub

Sep 2025 to Nov 2025, computer vision

Voice-controlled robotic arm

A 4-DOF arm driven by a custom YOLOv11 model, with a deterministic control state machine mapping camera depth to servo angles at 0.5-degree accuracy, streamed to a Raspberry Pi over UDP.

Oct 2024, machine learning

Thermal performance predictor

Time-sequential neural networks standing in for slow thermal energy storage simulations. At Calit2 the same work cut a 15-hour simulation to 6 minutes including training.

View on GitHub

Model predictions plotted against the reference simulation.

Sep 2024, AI in education

Automated Python quiz generator

GPT writes quiz questions for UC Irvine's intro course, a synthesized voice reads them, and a video pipeline cuts them into short-form review clips. Cut content-creation workload by 93%.

View on GitHub

May 2024, artificial intelligence

Minesweeper AI

An agent that clears boards using deterministic logical inference first, then probability estimates when certainty runs out. It outperformed 80 percent of participants in its course tournament.

View on GitHub

Projects as a page

The wall

School, research, and the teaching that came with it.

Expected Dec 2026, New York

Columbia University, MS in Computer Science

Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing, Reinforcement Learning.

Jun 2025, Irvine

University of California, Irvine, BS in Computer Science

Where the teaching started, and where Carbeetle got its first camera.

Oct 2024 to Mar 2025

Machine Learning Engineer, Calit2

Built a real-time LSTM prediction model in PyTorch simulating large-scale thermal behavior of energy storage systems, reducing simulation time from 15 hours to 6 minutes including training.

Sep 2023 to Mar 2025

Guest Lecturer and Teaching Assistant, UC Irvine

Guest-lectured a 360-student session on Python and data structures, and led a team of learning assistants coordinating grading, exams, and administrative operations.

Jan 2024

NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates, Elementary Computing for All

Co-developed one of the first elementary computational-thinking curricula.

Oct 2024

Artificial Intelligence Research Assistant, GenAI in Education

Researching the impact AI has on education.

Experience as a page

AERA 2025

Designing a Culturally Sustaining Computer Science Curriculum Integrated with Environmental Literacy through a Research-Practice Partnership.

Brian presenting at the 2025 AERA Annual Meeting.

Co-designing a CS curriculum with elementary teachers for predominantly Latinx and multilingual communities, built to honor community knowledge rather than paper over it. Presented at the 2025 AERA Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado.

Read the paper

Off the clock

Same reason as the car: the trail keeps me sharp.