UF Computer Science '27 · Open to ML & AI roles

I build systems
& chase ideas
worth testing.

I'm Dat Le, an ML engineer in training at the University of Florida. I've shipped models over 50M-row production pipelines, published computer-vision research, and I'm now tracing fine-tuned behavior back to individual training tokens on Gemma-3 12B.

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Dat. ComicsPage 02
Chapter 01 · Experience

Where I've shipped

  1. VSP Vision

    Feb 2026 – Aug 2026

    Machine Learning Engineer Intern

    Rancho Cordova, CA · Remote

    rows through the pipeline
    50M+rows through the pipeline
    models shipped to prod
    2models shipped to prod
    AUC-ROC on 1:99 imbalance
    0.85AUC-ROC on 1:99 imbalance
    • Built an end-to-end pipeline over 50M+ rows — Snowflake ingest through model scoring to marketing-side export — and deployed 2 production models via Snowflake Model Registry on scheduled, YAML-configured runs.
    • Implemented dynamic batched loading in SQL and Python for scheduled inference on 50M-row tables, and co-designed the deployment template and data contract that standardized the team's ML release process.
    • Configured a Snowflake Cortex Agent that turns stakeholders' natural-language questions into optimized SQL, so they can generate their own graphs and tables.
    • Built an Isolation Forest classifier on a 1:99 imbalanced dataset (0.85 AUC-ROC, 0.20 PR-AUC), plus a GAN synthetic-data pipeline that improved F1 on classification benchmarks.
    • Hosted workshops on Gaussian Mixture Models, Transformers, GANs and Mixture of Experts for the Data Science department.
    • Snowflake
    • SQL
    • Python
    • Isolation Forest
    • GANs
    • MLOps
  2. AlgoGators Investment Fund

    Jan 2026 – Present

    Quant Developer

    University of Florida · Gainesville, FL

    • Manage the fund's data engine on PostgreSQL, pgAdmin and Docker, orchestrating ETL pipelines for market-data ingestion and backtesting.
    • Use Mixture-of-Experts and reinforcement learning to generate synthetic anomaly data, then train XGBoost + attention models to detect tail events.
    • PostgreSQL
    • Docker
    • ETL
    • XGBoost
    • Reinforcement learning
    • Mixture of Experts
  3. Viettel AI Center

    May 2025 – Aug 2025

    AI Engineer Intern

    Hanoi, Vietnam

    alarms modeled
    2.6Malarms modeled
    fault classes
    3.3kfault classes
    held-out, Jamba-lite (vs 72% GRU)
    85%held-out, Jamba-lite (vs 72% GRU)
    • Trained an end-to-end PyTorch sequence model that predicts the next network fault from multi-domain alarm streams — 2.6M alarms, 126k sequences, 3.3k fault classes — selecting checkpoints by hyperparameter search on reproducible snapshots.
    • Implemented a Jamba-lite hybrid (Mamba SSM + selective attention) against a GRU baseline — 85% vs 72% on the held-out set — and handled class imbalance with class weights, focal loss and label smoothing.
    • Pushed single-GPU training to 80% utilization with TF32 mixed precision, pinned memory and tuned DataLoaders; reported Top-k accuracy and object-level recall dashboards.
    • PyTorch
    • Mamba / SSMs
    • Sequence modeling
    • TF32 / mixed precision
    • Hyperparameter search
  4. UF Precision Agriculture Lab

    Aug 2024 – Present

    Machine Learning Research Assistant

    University of Florida · Gainesville, FL

    IoU on canopy segmentation
    0.924IoU on canopy segmentation
    less manual labeling
    90%less manual labeling
    ripeness prediction accuracy
    +25%ripeness prediction accuracy
    • Developed a CUDA-accelerated OpenCV pipeline integrating YOLO detection and SAM2 segmentation for video-scale plant tracking, reaching 90% reliability across full growth cycles and cutting manual labeling effort by 90%.
    • Built a PyTorch LSTM that predicts ripeness from segmentation-derived fruit and temporal growth patterns, improving accuracy by 25%.
    Pub­lished!

    ASABE Annual International Meeting 2025

    AI-Driven Plant Tracking and Segmentation for Precise Canopy Estimation in Strawberry Field

    Z. Huang, W. S. Lee, M. Đ. Lê

    Field-scale strawberry canopy estimation from video: YOLOv11 detects plants, flowers and fruit; an enhanced ByteTrack tracker (moving averages + motion constraints) holds each plant's identity across frames; and Segment Anything, prompted by YOLO boxes and auto-selected exclusion points, segments each canopy. Reached 0.924 IoU without camera calibration, beating non-learning baselines.

    • PyTorch
    • CUDA
    • OpenCV
    • YOLO
    • SAM2
    • LSTM
    • Computer vision
  5. FPT Software

    Jun 2024 – Aug 2024

    FinTech Software Engineer Intern

    Hanoi, Vietnam · On-site

    param LLaMA 3.1 assistant
    8Bparam LLaMA 3.1 assistant
    over project documentation
    RAGover project documentation
    on-site internship
    3 moon-site internship
    • Developed an internal task-management assistant using LLaMA 3.1 8B integrated with Node.js to automate and streamline task handouts in a Waterfall development model.
    • Implemented Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to query and synthesize project documentation for context-aware task assignments.
    • Reduced manual coordination effort, improved clarity in task delegation, and built a scalable AI integration framework for structured workflows.
    • LLaMA 3.1
    • RAG
    • Node.js
    • LLMs
  6. Dream Team Engineering

    Jan 2024 – Present

    Project Captain, Launchpad Team

    Gainesville, FL · Part-time

    twitch-detection accuracy
    97%twitch-detection accuracy
    cost cut for small clinics
    $3k+cost cut for small clinics
    person team led
    5person team led
    • Take over stalled projects to finish development, document them thoroughly, and deploy deliverables for hospital and clinical use.
    • Gator Goes to Surgery — led a five-person team building an interactive iOS app (Xcode, Cocos2d-X, C++) that eases children's anxiety before medical procedures; coordinated with Shands Hospital on App Store release and hospital integration.
    • Train of Four — engineered an ML + MediaPipe twitch-response evaluation system at 97% accuracy that removes manual oversight and saves mid-to-small clinics over $3,000; deployed on Android.
    • Milk Bank Optimizer — a calculator website that helps milk bank staff split donated milk into batches that meet calorie and protein targets.
    • RAG chatbot — built a retrieval-augmented chatbot for Dream Team Engineering and the UF College of Medicine.
    • C++
    • iOS / Cocos2d-X
    • MediaPipe
    • Android
    • RAG
    • Leadership
  7. Hanoi University of Science and Technology

    Jun 2023 – Sep 2023

    Research Assistant

    Hanoi, Vietnam · Part-time

    • Completed an 8-week IoT and AI summer training program run by Hanoi University of Science and Technology with Makipos Electric Company.
    • Supported senior students and professors in carrying out graduation projects and theses.
    • C++
    • IoT
    • AI

Continued on page 03 ▸

Dat. ComicsPage 03
Chapter 02 · Projects & research

Things I've built

Issue #01
2026

AgentFork

A counterfactual debugger for black-box LLM agents in stateful environments. Tracing tells you what an agent did; AgentFork tells you what would have happened otherwise. Fork a recorded trajectory at any step, rebuild the Postgres world exactly as it was, change one thing (the model, what retrieval returned, a tool's reply, what memory held), then run it forward N times to get an outcome distribution instead of a guess. Agents are recorded as OpenTelemetry GenAI spans with content-addressed payloads at 0.0037% overhead. Replays fan out over a Redis Streams queue with leases, reclaim on worker death, idempotent results and a shared token-bucket rate limiter, each in its own isolated database across five isolation strategies that are ablated for leaks by state hashing. On injected faults with no oracle access, adding replay-based intervention to trace analysis raised layer-attribution accuracy from 79.7% to 96.9% (McNemar p < 0.001), and a regression gate replays past incidents to block bad config changes.

  • Python
  • PostgreSQL
  • Redis Streams
  • OpenTelemetry
  • MCP
  • LLM agents
  • Causal inference
Issue #02
2026

transPEAKtation

Routes a whole city around congestion before it forms. The app pulls events and road data from across town into MongoDB for persistence, then runs the time-series logic on Tiger Data. On top of that, we built and trained a deep learning model from scratch that forecasts congestion across all of San Francisco at horizons from 10–30 minutes out to 1–3 hours. Dynamic Dijkstra finds the 24 best road options, then a PPO reinforcement-learning policy or a heuristic load balancer assigns a route to every person in the traffic flow so everyone gets home as fast as possible. At 30% participation, our users get home 30% faster; at 100% participation, traffic drops by 60%. Built with a four-person team at ShellHacks — won 2nd Place Best Use of AWS and Best Use of Tiger Data.

  • Deep learning
  • PPO / RL
  • Dijkstra
  • MongoDB
  • Tiger Data
  • AWS
  • Hackathon
Issue #03
2024–Now

Clinical Action Prediction

A spatio-temporal graph neural network in PyTorch Geometric with CUDA graphs that predicts a patient's next 5 clinical actions at 82% precision. Integrated PubMedBERT embeddings with the Athena database and applied outlier-sensitive min-max scaling, reducing noise by 18%. Built with Dream Team Engineering.

  • PyTorch Geometric
  • CUDA
  • GNNs
  • PubMedBERT
Issue #04
2025

Train of Four

An Android app that replaces expensive train-of-four monitoring hardware with a phone camera. During the train-of-four procedure, MediaPipe hand-landmark tracking detects the patient's thumb twitches in response to nerve stimulation and scores them automatically: 97% accuracy, no manual oversight, and over $3,000 saved for mid-to-small clinics. Built natively in Kotlin with Dream Team Engineering.

  • Kotlin
  • Android
  • MediaPipe
  • Computer vision
  • Healthcare
Issue #05
2025

Milk Bank Optimizer

A calculator website for milk bank staff that works out how to split donated milk into suitable batches, combining donations into pools that meet calorie and protein targets instead of balancing them by hand. Built in React and hosted on Firebase with Dream Team Engineering.

  • React
  • JavaScript
  • Firebase
  • Optimization
  • Healthcare
Issue #06

Gator Goes to Surgery

An interactive iOS game that eases children's anxiety before medical procedures. I led a five-person team building it in C++ on Cocos2d-X and coordinated with UF Health Shands Hospital on App Store release and hospital integration.

  • C++
  • Cocos2d-X
  • iOS
  • Xcode
  • Healthcare
Issue #07
2024

Horus

The eye for the blind: a real-time navigation assistant on a Raspberry Pi that warns visually impaired users about obstacles and reads signs aloud, combining YOLO object detection, depth estimation and PaddleOCR. AWS EC2/S3 infrastructure provisioned with Terraform for device monitoring and over-the-air model updates. Won Best Use of Terraform at SwampHacks.

  • Raspberry Pi
  • C++
  • OpenCV
  • YOLO
  • Terraform
  • AWS
  • Hackathon
Issue #08
2026

At-Home Range of Motion

Range-of-motion testing without the trip to the clinic: native Android (Kotlin) and iOS (Swift) apps that run MediaPipe pose tracking on-device so patients can take a ROM test at home, skipping the time and cost of commuting to a clinical facility. Tested on external rotation, forward elevation, external rotation at 90° and abduction.

  • Kotlin
  • Swift
  • MediaPipe
  • Android
  • iOS
  • Pose estimation
Issue #09
2024

Dermatology Diagnosis

Upload a photo of a skin lesion and get the three most likely diagnoses across seven lesion types, from benign keratosis and melanocytic nevi to melanoma and basal cell carcinoma. I built a CNN ensemble of ResNet-50, EfficientNet and YOLO, trained in PyTorch on 10K+ medical images with OpenCV preprocessing, which boosted top-1 accuracy by 12% and top-3 accuracy by 18%. The top-3 predictions are served through a FastAPI REST endpoint, containerized with Docker and deployed on AWS ECS at 99.9% uptime.

  • PyTorch
  • OpenCV
  • ResNet-50
  • EfficientNet
  • YOLO
  • FastAPI
  • Docker
  • AWS
Issue #10
2023–2024

SET Robot

A robot built with UF's SASE Engineering Team. I worked on the electrical side, wiring the robot's electronics: Arduino Uno and Nano controllers, motor drivers for the drive wheels, and the stepper motor and servos that move the arm. I also handled the lidar data processing. Distance and signal-strength frames from a TF-series lidar are read over serial, paired with the stepper's sweep angle, and converted from polar readings into x–y points the navigation code can use.

  • Arduino
  • C++
  • Python
  • Lidar
  • Electronics
  • Robotics
Research files

Questions I've chased

Research file #01
2026–Now

Tracing fine-tuned behavior back to training tokens

Theoretical ML Researcher · University of Florida

A gradient-based model-diffing method that decomposes a fine-tuned model's weight update into a sparse sum of per-token gradient atoms — attributing behaviors learned during fine-tuning to specific tokens, sentences and documents in the training data. I built the multi-GPU gradient extraction pipeline (PyTorch, CUDA, DDP, LoRA, EKFAC) for Gemma-3 12B, computing per-token gradients across 406K+ completion tokens and 2.2M LoRA parameters.

    Research file #02
    2024–2025

    AI-driven plant tracking for canopy estimation

    UF/IFAS Precision Agriculture Lab · ASABE 2025

    Canopy size drives strawberry yield prediction, but measuring it by hand doesn't scale to whole fields. Our workflow runs in three stages over field video, with no camera calibration and no fine-tuning of SAM. First, YOLOv11 detects every plant, plus its flowers and fruit, in each frame. Second, an enhanced ByteTrack tracker keeps each plant's identity across frames. ByteTrack matches both high- and low-confidence detections against Kalman-predicted tracks, and we added moving averages and motion constraints so identities stay stable from frame to frame. Third, Segment Anything (SAM) segments each canopy, prompted with the plant's YOLO box plus automatically selected point prompts that exclude overlapping neighbors, flowers and fruit. The result is 0.924 IoU, beating the non-learning baselines. Published at the 2025 ASABE Annual International Meeting (paper 2500347).

      Continued on page 04 ▸

      Dat. ComicsPage 04
      Chapter 03 · About

      A little about me

      Origin story

      I'm Dat — a University of Florida student who likes taking ML from a whiteboard idea all the way to production. I've interned at Viettel AI and FPT Software in Hanoi and at VSP Vision, and now split my time between research and shipping.

      I'm most drawn to deep learning systems, hardware-aware optimization, and ML that lands somewhere it matters — like healthcare. Right now I'm tracing fine-tuned behaviors back to individual training tokens.

      Power-ups

      Languages

      • Python
      • C/C++
      • Rust
      • SQL
      • R
      • Java
      • Bash

      Machine learning

      • PyTorch
      • PyTorch Geometric
      • TensorFlow
      • Transformers
      • scikit-learn
      • XGBoost
      • Mech interp
      • RL

      ML infra & data

      • CUDA
      • Distributed training
      • Snowflake
      • Docker
      • AWS
      • Terraform
      • Redis
      • PostgreSQL
      • MCP

      Achievements unlocked

      1. 2026

        ShellHacks

        2nd Place Best Use of AWS + Best Use of Tiger Data (transPEAKtation)

      2. 2025

        Published at ASABE

        AI-driven plant tracking & canopy segmentation, 0.924 IoU

      3. 2023

        ACSL — Top 1%

        American Computer Science League, ~8,000 competitors

      4. 2022

        1 Idea 1 World — Gold

        International Invention & Innovation Competition

      Side quests

      • Quantitative Developer

        AlgoGators Investment Fund · 2026–Now

      • Project Captain, Launchpad

        Dream Team Engineering · 2024–Now

      • IoT & AI Research Assistant

        Hanoi Univ. of Science & Technology · 2023

      Finale on the last page ▸