Hi, I'm Shyamal Suhana Chandra.
Principal Software Engineer with hands-on, management tactical and strategic thinking.

• Participated as a Software Engineering Fellow for 2024 Headstarters Fellowship:
  • Built and deployed 5 AI projects in 5 weeks using React JS, Next.js, Firebase, Clerk, and Vercel with agile sprints and CI/CD.
  • Developed an interactive customer support agent with custom RAG pipeline using OpenAI and Pinecone.
  • Built a SaaS flashcard generator with Llama 3.1 via Groq API, Stripe paywall, and custom pricing plans.
  • Created Rate My Professor with Pinecone index and LangChain + GPT-4o RAG pipeline.
  • Participated in weekly sessions with engineers from Google, Y Combinator, Stanford, Amazon, and venture-backed startups.
  • Participated in two hackathons with demos on City Dispatch Simulator and real-time speech recognition with LLM feedback via speech synthesis.
• Manager and Chief Engineer at Sapana Micro Software — apps for macOS/iOS/watchOS/tvOS including SMS-Water-Track-I and Prayer-Track-I released on the Apple App Store in 2024.
• Produces Swift/SwiftUI, Bash, Python, Processing, P5.js, C/C++, and Java code.
• Created three podcasts: Techno Kungfu (7 ep.), Long Tail Programming (2 ep.), and Long Tail News (18 ep.).
• Sole technical founder of Domino Data Systems (YC Pre-Startup): twelve Vercel apps, five SwiftUI apps, seven Bash/Zsh shell apps, and fifteen Python 3 apps for automated generative education.
• Independent songwriter via DistroKid (May 2024–Present): wrote roughly 430+ songs from scratch across multiple EPs and albums; songwriting since 2004 on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Music.
• Achieved a chess rating of 1719 in Lichess without coaching; beat 2980 & 2894 rated FIDE engines (FIDE Arena Candidate Master norm).
• Received 15 certificates in programming languages and for ML and AI.
• Mentored UCLA and Pitt undergraduate and graduate students (approximately 8 total).
• Mentored Swift.org summer mentee in 2022 and 2025.
• Wrote eBooks Bayesian Network Theory from First Principles and Bayesian Networks in Swift (Packt).
• One of three reviewers for Learn C Programming, Second Edition (Packt).
• Attended MIT, Stanford, UCLA, and Harvard events and participated in Q&A.
• Recorded covers for 57 mainstream Smule songs.
• Attended approximately 548 LunchClub meetings (417 connections).
• Posted 60 Instagram pieces of abstract art and videos (17 stories).
• Posted approx. 18.5K–18.8K Twitter posts with approx. 1.8 million impressions since Sept. 2014.
• Composed greater than 15 pieces of electronic music published on Bandcamp.
• Ranked 108 out of approximately 150K participants in MarketWatch Virtual Stock Exchange.
• Wrote seven preprint publications with C++ code on various computer science topics.
• Passionate about CS with hands-on experience across SwiftUI, Swift, VB 6, VB.NET, Obj-C, C, C++, C#, Rust, NativeScript, P5, Processing, Java, MATLAB, IronPython, Python, PySpark, Julia, UE4, JS, SQL, and Win32 API; started or forked greater than 1,900 repositories on GitHub.

• Alone built and deployed three apps on the Apple App Store as sole engineer.
• Writes Swift, SwiftUI, Objective-C, Python, and Bash in Xcode — including SMS-Water-Track-I and Prayer-Track-I (2024).
• Produces Processing, P5.js, C/C++, and Java code for client and internal projects.

• Made twelve Vercel apps from scratch using Next.js, TailwindCSS, Node.js, and TypeScript with Vercel KV or Redis backends.
• Made five SwiftUI apps showcasing SLI, UX, and GenAI for automated generative education.
• Made seven Bash/Zsh shell apps for automating educational curriculum generation.
• Made fifteen Python 3 apps for automating educational curriculum generation.
• Founded pre-startups in Y Combinator Startup School 2019.

• Wrote roughly 430+ songs from scratch across multiple EPs and albums.
• Songwriting since April 2004 — many songs released under the same name on streaming platforms.

• Built and deployed 5 AI projects in 5 weeks using React, Next.js, Firebase, Clerk, and Vercel with agile sprints and CI/CD.
• Developed interactive customer support agent with custom RAG pipeline using OpenAI and Pinecone.
• Built SaaS flashcard generator with Llama 3.1 via Groq API, Stripe paywall, and custom pricing plans.
• Created Rate My Professor with Pinecone index and LangChain + GPT-4o RAG pipeline.
• Participated in weekly sessions with engineers from Google, Y Combinator, Stanford, Amazon, and venture-backed startups.
• Participated in two hackathons: City Dispatch Simulator and real-time speech recognition with LLM feedback via speech synthesis.

• Studied LLMs, Llama, Amazon Bedrock, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, OpenAI GPT-4o, and prompt engineering.
• Built solo demo project and earned certificate.

• Technical work involving Docker, JavaScript, and other scripting languages.

• Processed tickets for Microsoft Xbox Support after hours.

• Reviewed Learn C Programming, Second Edition for Packt Publications.

• Sourced gigs for varied technical jobs.

• Tutoring AP World and US History in Socratic form.

• Bernie Sanders 2020 DNC Primary Campaign volunteer.

• Completed Startup School curriculum.

• Completed Startup School curriculum; founded pre-startup work at Domino Data Systems.

• Advised Smart Spin iOS app team.

• Self-directed projects with Python, UE4, C/C++, and Java.
• Developed projects for iOS, watchOS, tvOS, macOS, Swift/SwiftUI, and Objective-C.
• Worked on Packt Bayesian Networks books; created podcasts Long Tail News and Techno Kungfu on iTunes.
• Reviewed papers as SIGCSE 2020 program committee member.

• Mentoring one student from the Computer Science B.S. program.

• Pittsburgh Links and Pitt Honors mentoring for undergraduate students (2 students total).

• UCLA Mentoring Program for 3 undergraduates and 1 graduate in CS/EE.

• Mentoring for Swift.org Documentation.

• Posted material relevant to the local chapter.

Unlike traditional von Neumann machines, Cognitive Computing creates next-generation systems that learn through experiences, create hypotheses, and remember. IBM SyNAPSE models computing systems emulating the brain's efficiency, size, and power without being programmed — combining nanoscience, neuroscience, and supercomputing under DARPA funding ($40M+). Phase goals progressed from 10K-neuron to 10M-neuron to 100M-neuron spiking networks culminating in robotic "cat" level performance. Project leader of the Environments team.

• Project leader of the Environments team for SyNAPSE.
• Lead developer for micro-UAV object avoidance and road following algorithms and systems design from scratch with one-to-one with the virtual micro-UAV in UE2/UE3.
• Developed two scalable, multi-panel visualization tools (BrainCam and FlexiBrainCam) using Java Swing, Quicktime for Java, and Perl.
• Designed techniques for real-time performance while synchronizing up to 40 MPEG-1 videos and unlimited aggregate statistics under memory and computation constraints.
• Filed one patent application and two patent disclosures.
• Created a starlet corelet (see Cognitive Computing Systems: Algorithms and Applications for Networks of Neurosynaptic Cores).
• Exploited parallelization techniques in MATLAB to reduce turnaround time.
• Co-wrote the aerial robotic framework to control with vision and controller support.
• Created an atlas of brain areas (unpublished).
• Developed specification and implementation of an image dataset generation tool for training neural algorithms.
• Co-invented and co-implemented biologically-inspired spiking neural network micro-circuits in MATLAB.
• Developed Java interface to control a virtual robot using Xbox 360 Controller in real-time for DARPA presentation.
• Wrote C++ driver for visualization of neuromorphic chip using OpenCV.
• Created Cognitive Computing website using DOJO, YUI, and Javascript for external release.
• Created multiple complex levels for testing neuromorphic algorithms in UT3 and UT2.
• Administered multiple Linux servers and NAS enterprise drives.
• Wrote automation scripts for UT3 level in Windows for robot control.
• Tested algorithms on mini-aerial robotic virtual and physical testbeds including quadcopters.
• Optimized numerical operations for speed due to time limitations.
• Ran mouse-scale simulations on Blue Gene/L supercomputer written in C.
• Developed Java code to extract brain area volumes from 3D Paxinos Atlas data.
• Designed auditory neural encoding scheme based on basilar membrane and cochlea for mouse-scale models.
• Presented at Society for Neuroscience (SfN 2008) — largest international meeting of neuroscientists.
• Created movies of 3D vector-based models using Google Sketchup Pro for DARPA presentations.
• Wrote and presented MATLAB experiments with simple/complex cell layers on feedforward vision model (Serre-Poggio PAMI 2007).
• Devised scheme to convert Google 3D Warehouse models into textured static meshes for Unreal Tournament 2004.
• Created real-time, end-to-end, closed-loop neuromorphic robotic demos integrating Python, UnrealScript, and C++.
• Wrote complex UnrealScript and modified USARSim for Unreal without documentation or supervision.
• Presented during DARPA site visits and to external IBM clients.
• Designed fault-tolerant, modular, reusable, scalable real-time infrastructure in C/C++ using Win32, DirectX, WinSock2, OpenCV.
• Tackled data synchronization, multi-platform socket integration, real-time visualization, and multi-sensory logging.
• Addressed challenging bug fixes to infrastructure from university partners.
• Built power-efficient spiking neural network demonstrations under tight DARPA constraints without prior art.
• Designed novel neural network algorithms from scratch in closed-loop systems.
• Co-authored neuromorphic paper explaining algorithms topping prior art in spiking neural networks.
• Co-authored unpublished internal robotics paper on the real-time system.
• Administered server systems for disk backup and back-end processing with UNIX commands.
• Made 2D atlas/periodic table for a brain species (unpublished).
• Wrote advanced corelets for Cognitive Computing Systems: Algorithms and Applications for Networks of Neurosynaptic Cores.

Acknowledgments from collaborators:

• NSCS evaluates expected behavior of neuronal algorithms when deployed on actual hardware. — Thomas Wong
• Designed spiking neural networks for optic flow to control a quadcopter on IBM SyNAPSE. — Kris Peterson
• Major breakthroughs in pattern recognition with neuromorphic systems under DARPA SyNAPSE; designed architecture and algorithms for neuromorphic silicon chip. — Andi Rango
• Led team designing motion detection and trajectory estimation neural network demonstration for TrueNorth ecosystem. — Davis Barch
• Cornell MAV obstacle avoidance paper ACK: Dharmendra Modha, Shyamal Chandra, Thomas Zimmerman, Stefano Carpin, Steve Esser, Myron Flickner, Jerry Yeh, Dale Cassidy, Jasdeep Hundal, Brian Wojcik.
• Cornell eCommons aerial robot ACK: special thanks to IBM team and Cornell collaborators on aerial robot work.

• Responsible for large-scale visualization toolset, simulation analysis, interface adapters, algorithm prototyping, and environment creation.
• Designed algorithms for real-time synchronization of up to forty MPEG-1 videos and unlimited statistics on low-end T41 laptop; modified Berkeley MPEG-1 encoder.
• Translated high-polygon Sketchup models into textured static meshes for Unreal Tournament.
• Ran and analyzed mouse-scale simulations on Blue Gene supercomputer in C (100M+ neurons).
• Co-wrote prototype vision model with simple/complex cell layers and SVM/K-NN classifiers benchmarking Serre-Poggio feedforward model.

• Developed proof-of-concept Flex/Tomcat/Lucene/DB2 web application translating service catalogues for $40B strategic outsourcing pricing.
• Reduced day-long SO pricing task to under one minute per deal.
• Added probabilistic inference engine learning mappings from prior deals.
• Integrated Naïve Bayes, Bayesian Networks, Decision Rules, RIPPER, and SVM.
• Filed one patent disclosure; unfinished publication on Services Hierarchical Taxonomy.

• Taught recitations, graded, and held office hours for Operating Systems Principles (Professor Eddie Kohler).
• Led recitation and lab for CS 111 — described as the hardest undergraduate CS class.
• Graded papers and answered student emails.

• Explored multi-view vision inference using Cyclops camera sensors.
• Gave CENS internal talk on Carlos Guestrin's VLDB 2004 sensor network paper to Deborah Estrin and CENS community.
• Part of TENET team with USC's Ramesh Govindan and Felipe Vieira and UCLA's Ben Greenstein and Eddie Kohler.

• Wrote embedded systems code in NesC (TinyOS, TinyDB) for MICA sensor motes.
• Gave faculty presentation on NesC language and TinyOS operating system.

• Taught lab, graded, and held office hours for Introduction to Personal Computing.

• Developed data-driven Visual Basic applications and ASP/VBScript/JavaScript web apps.
• Wrote TSQL stored procedures for SQL Server; tested with TestDirector.

• Created portions of City website using FrontPage and graphics tools.
• Worked with Windows 2000 network and IIS; assisted troubleshooting Windows applications.

• Built solo demo project and earned certificate.

• Sole Author, Agentic Parallel Book Writing: Hierarchical Multi-Agent Coordination of Local Language Models for Coherent Long-Form Fiction Generation, Domino Data Systems GitHub Pages, 2026.
• Sole Author, book2screenplay: A Hierarchical Multi-Agent Pipeline for Local Book-to-Screenplay and Narrated Video Adaptation, Crankshaft News GitHub Pages, 2026.

• Author, Bayesian Network Theory from First Principles [Integrated Course and eBook] (Packt).
• Co-author, Teaching Programming Concepts by Developing Games, arXiv, 2019.
• Co-author, Cognitive Computing Systems: Algorithms and Applications for Networks of Neurosynaptic Cores, IJCNN 2013.
• Co-author, Cognitive Computing Commercialization: Boundary Objects For Communication, 3rd Int. Conf. on Integration of Design, Engineering & Management for Innovation — Best Paper Award.
• Co-author, Building block of a programmable neuromorphic substrate: A digital neurosynaptic core, IJCNN 2012.
• Co-author, An Evaluation of the Usefulness of Compiler Error Messages, CMU Technical Report CMU-04-09-03, Dec 2003.
• First author, CBigInt Class: An Implementation of Big Integers in C++, Journal of Computing Sciences, Apr 2005.
• First author, A Comparison of Java and C#, Journal of Computing Sciences, Feb 2005.
• Co-author, A Comparison of VBSCRIPT, JAVASCRIPT, and JSCRIPT, Journal of Computing Sciences, Oct 2003.
• Seven preprint publications with C++ code on various computer science topics.

Adaptive and integrated visualization of spatiotemporal data from large-scale simulation. A simulation runs on multiple processors generating spatiotemporal data samples with spatial coordinates, time stamps at specific time resolution, and tags. Data samples assemble into streams based on spatial relationship and tags; each stream encodes into multiple formats; integrated adaptive visualization simultaneously and synchronously displays various data streams.

• First Author, Inferfacing Auditory Input and Output Spike Streams in a Large-scale Cortical Simulator.
• Second Author, Imaging the Spatio-temporal dynamics of Large-scale Cortical Simulations.

• Co-Author, Cyclops: A Reconfigurable Low-power Platform for Distributed Image Sensing.

• University Graduate Fellowship (full tuition & stipend) + 2 years RA/TA guaranteed.

• Pitt Honors College–Eligible · University Scholar · Top QPA in College of Arts and Sciences, class of 2005.

• IBM Certificate of Appreciation for 2009 & 2010 Technical Accomplishment (SyNAPSE)
• IBM Invention 1st File Regular Patent Award (February 2010)
• IBM Image Award (2012)
• UCLA Graduate Fellowship (2005–2006)
• University of Pittsburgh University Scholarship (2001–2005)
• Mitchelson Foundation Scholarship (2001–2005)
• Computer Science Department Honor Roll (2002–2003)
• Valedictorian — Pittsburg High School (2001)
• 2nd Place, 2005 Carnegie Mellon University Invitational Programming Contest
• CS Games 2004 — 1st Place Midnight Club PC Gaming Competition (McGill University)
• CS Games 2005 — 3rd Amazing Race; 5th Trivia; 6th AI; 8th Logic (Laval University)
• Graduated Summa Cum Laude with Departmental CS Honors, UPitt (2005)
• Rank 1 (Co-Valedictorian), Pittsburg High School (2001)
• College of Arts & Sciences Undergraduate Studies Scholarship (Fall 2004)
• University of Pittsburgh Dean's List (2001–2005); National Dean's List (2002–2004)
• Member of Pittsburgh Chess League Division IVC Championship Team (2002)
• All A Honor Roll — grades 9–12; PSU All-A Scholastic Honors — Summer 2000
• Phi Kappa Phi Outstanding Achievement Award — grade 11
• Who's Who Among American High School Students — 1997, 1998, 1999
• USAA All-American Scholar — 1997, 1998; NSMA 1998; NEMA 1998
• 1st Place, 2000 Celebrate Our Diversity Contest Multimedia Presentation
• Multiple chess tournament placements — state and regional (1997–2001)

• Campus Representative, Google Inc. (2004–2005)
• Manager & Coder, ACM ICPC (Pitt) — teams placed 34 & 35 of 133 (2005) and 27 & 60 of 144 (2004)
• Manager & Coder, CS Games — teams 23rd (2004) & 11th (2005)
• Founder and First President, Upsilon Pi Epsilon CS Honor Society (April 2005)
• President, ACM Student Chapter (April 2003–April 2005) — revived chapter, Google talk (130+ students), Richard Stallman talk (180+)
• External Reviewer, VLDB 2004
• Researcher, Advanced Data Management Technologies Laboratory (Fall 2003–Summer 2004)
• Webmaster & Secretary, Hindu Student Council (2002–2004)
• Manager, UPitt ACM Programming Contest Teams (2003–2004)
• Member, Golden Key International Honor Society (2003–2005)
• President — National Honor Society & Chess Club — grade 12
• Head designer — PHS NASA Moonbuggy Team — grade 12
• Adult Member, US Chess Federation (2023–Present)

• Adopt-A-Family, Hearts & Hammers, American Heart Walk, Relay for Life (National Honor Society)
• Christmas Caroling at Carrington's Nursing Home
• 2000 United Way Day of Caring; Thanksgiving Meal Delivery at John's Lutheran Church
• Fundraiser for Fox Theatre restoration; Pancake Feed ticket seller (Key Club)
• Installed Visual Studio 6.0 voluntarily on PSU Kelce Lab computers
• World Food Festival at Little Balkans Day; Taste of the World India Booth (PSU ISA)

• Pitt Links Mentor — Oct 2024–Present (1 CS B.S. student)
• Alumni Mentor UPitt — Nov 2020–Present (2 undergraduates)
• Alumni Mentor UCLA — Sep 2020–Present (3 undergrad + 1 grad CS/EE)
• Swift.org Mentor — Jul 2021–Oct 2022; Summer 2025
• Mentored ~8 UCLA and Pitt undergraduate and graduate students total

• Hard working — excellent work ethic
• Determined — tries different techniques with patience and focus
• Creative/Inventive — 1 patent filed, 2 patent disclosures; diagonal thinker
• Curious — reads widely and spreads knowledge
• Works well under time pressure — delivers early prototypes
• Speed — delivers faster than imagined
• Quick learner — masters tools and languages under pressure
• Great speaker — dramatic approach with creative analogies
• Great writer — persuasive sentences with rich vocabulary
• Perfectionist — never settles for mediocrity
• Dependable — executes on time without supervision
• Risk-taker — joined the most ambitious project in CS
• Passionate — 110% effort
• Team player — helps others and imparts knowledge
• Works independent — systematic quantitative analysis
• Self-driven — no hand holding required
• Hands-off programmer — clean, lasting code
• Ambitious — likes nontrivial tough projects
• Well-rounded — good at finding analogies
• Conquers challenges — tackles vicious subjects with ease
• "Nothing is impossible" attitude
• Independent thinker
• Constantly growing — seeks new subfields

• World Chess: ~352 games, 66 tournaments (highest place: 1st).
• FIDE Online Arena (FOA): ~159 games; Rapid ~946; normed Arena Candidate Master (ACM) late 2025; beat 2980 & 2894 rated engines.
• USCF: Quick rating 1428 (P23).
• Lichess: ~97 rated games; classical ~1684.79 (provisional); peak self-coached rating 1719.
• Chess.com: ~78 games; highest rapid 1217 (90.5 percentile).
• 2nd of 15 — FIDE Online Arena Daily Tournament (2/16/2023).

• HackerRank: 38 problems · Python (Basic) certificate.
• CodeWars: 29 problems.
• LeetCode: in progress.
• FreeCodeCamp: 211 points; SoloLearn Level 10 certs (C, HTML, PHP, React+Redux) plus Java, C++, Python core.
• Kaggle: 6 certificates (ML Explainability, Pandas, CV, Intermediate ML, Intro DL, Intro ML).

• ~18.8K tweets · ~557 followers · 1.8M+ impressions (avg ~114/tweet).
• 106K+ profile visits since March 2021 · 150+ mentions since March 2021.
• ~236,271 views on Quora.com.
• 60 Instagram posts (17 stories) · 548 LunchClub meetings (417 connections).

• ~170 days 8h 32m total Xbox gaming time.
• Games: Rockstar Table Tennis, Midnight Club: LA, GTA Vice City, Brute Force, Forza Motorsport 7, Virtua Tennis 4, Max: Curse of Brotherhood, Die Another Day, and more.
• Lips Xbox 360 — 39th world (Hot and Cold), 79th world (Gonna Break Your Heart).
• Let's Sing 2020 — 70th world (No Roots).