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Open to Summer 2027 internships

Johnny Chen

A Software Engineer, A Computer Science Student, An AI/ML Researcher, A Web Developer

Computer Science student at the University at Buffalo. I'm building Anchor, an accessible campus-navigation app for iPhone, and doing LLM/AI research with Algoverse.

About

I like building things end to end and care most about the details that make software trustworthy. As a UB Forge fellow I'm building Anchor, which routes wheelchair users and blind and low-vision students through campus buildings and refuses to suggest any route it can't back up with data. At Algoverse I set up the GPU environment our research team runs its experiments on.

My coursework leans toward systems. In C I've written a dynamic memory allocator and a semaphore-based producer–consumer queue with POSIX threads, and I'm working through the Pintos kernel in Operating Systems. I also have a long-running interest in data structures, especially hash tables (chaining, cuckoo hashing) and dynamic programming.

Education
University at Buffalo
B.S. Computer Science
Expected May 2028
Based in
Buffalo, NY
Coursework
  • Data Structures
  • Systems Programming
  • Algorithms & Complexity
  • Operating Systems
  • Computer Security
  • Linear Algebra

Featured Projects

What I'm building right now, from an accessible iOS app to 3D graphics in the browser.

  • 1 of 14

    UB Forge fellows, from 250+ applicants

  • 40

    Unit tests in Anchor's core

  • 10K+

    Units tracked at Sea Tow

01 — Featured · iOS

Anchor

Accessible indoor navigation for iPhone: step-free routing, spoken landmark guidance, and LiDAR proximity alerts.

My role: Designing step-free routing and spoken landmark guidance in SwiftUI; prototyping the LiDAR proximity alerts.

  • Dijkstra over a directed graph of corridors, doors, ramps, and elevators. Step-free mode excludes every connection not confirmed step-free rather than penalizing it, so stairs can never slip into a route.
  • When nothing qualifies, a relaxed second search names the exact connections that block the trip (“Elevator A (unavailable)”) instead of silently falling back to stairs.
  • LiDAR depth frames are sampled off the main thread at up to 10 Hz, filtered by per-pixel confidence, and reduced to a 5th-percentile nearest distance; the alert policy adds hysteresis, rate limiting, and stale-reading detection.
  • Swift
  • SwiftUI
  • ARKit
  • RealityKit
  • AVFoundation
  • XCTest
  • JavaScript
  • Playwright
  • GitHub Actions

02 — 3D · Web

Rubik's Cube CFOP Solver

An interactive 3D Rubik's Cube in the browser that solves itself using the CFOP method.

  • Generates interactive 3D solving sequences with a BFS-based move search.
  • Animates face turns in real time with quaternion-driven rotations in Three.js.
  • Migrated a legacy JavaScript/Three.js app to a component-based React architecture, fixing animation-state and rotation-sync bugs along the way.
  • React
  • JavaScript
  • Three.js
  • HTML/CSS

Experience

Research, fellowship, and internship work, most recent first.

  1. Algoverse

    Aug 2026 – Present

    LLM/AI Researcher · Remote

    • Configured and validated a GPU-accelerated environment for the team's research experiments using Python, PyTorch, and CUDA on Linux (WSL2).
    • Supporting preliminary evaluation of model outputs and documenting validation requirements with a mentor-led team.
    • Python
    • PyTorch
    • CUDA
    • Linux (WSL2)
  2. UB Forge, University at Buffalo

    Aug 2026 – Present

    Software Engineering Fellow · Buffalo, NY

    • Selected as 1 of 14 fellows from 250+ applicants through a competitive interview process.
    • Building Anchor, an accessible indoor navigation app for iPhone, with a small team, shipping weekly build reports ahead of a December 2026 demo at 43North.
    • Swift
    • SwiftUI
    • ARKit
    Anchor case study
  3. Sea Tow Foundation

    Jun 2023 – Aug 2023

    Data Analyst Intern · Southold, NY

    • Supported tracking for a distribution program delivering 10,000+ units by streamlining intake, application-review, and operational data workflows.
    • Improved the accuracy and speed of application evaluations by building and maintaining Excel tools for cleaning, organizing, and analyzing operational data.
    • Shared data-driven findings with the product-labeling, digital-asset, and social-media teams to support cross-functional decisions.
    • Excel

Skills

Languages

  • Python
  • Java
  • C/C++
  • JavaScript
  • SQL
  • Swift
  • HTML/CSS

Frameworks

  • React
  • Redux
  • Three.js
  • SwiftUI
  • PyTorch

Tools

  • Git
  • Docker
  • AWS
  • PostgreSQL
  • Matplotlib
  • Linux (WSL2)
  • CUDA

Concepts

  • Full-stack development
  • Object-oriented programming
  • REST APIs
  • Data structures & algorithms
  • Concurrency (POSIX threads)

Let's build something great together

I'm looking for Summer 2027 internships in software engineering and AI/ML. Whether it's an opportunity, a collaboration, or a question about Anchor, email is the fastest way to reach me.