Taichi Kato

My name is Taichi, a freshman at Amherst College, MA. I am currently freelancing as a full-stack engineer specializing in scaling machine learning solutions. You can view my résumé here.

From 2016 to 2019, I worked on Questo, an AI study assistant which dynamically generates reading comprehension quizzes from textbooks and websites. Questo won several awards and received more than $160,000 in subsidised funding from IBM and Google Cloud. With more than 8,000 users, Questo was used by students across the world to make learning more efficient. Questo was founded on my belief that knowledge acquisition can vastly be accelerated through the assistance of AI. I still believe that, but we have taken down Questo due to in 2019. I am actively looking for opportunities in using machine learning to make education more accessible.

In the summer of 2018, I worked at Mercari as a Software Engineer on their AI team, developing obejct classifcation models that run natively on mobile devices. The same summer, I was also privilleged to work as a deep learning researcher at Digital Nature Group, working on 2D image to 3D voxel generation using GANs with Prof. Ochyai. The previous summer in 2017, I was a software engineer intern at teamLab developing client iOS apps (I was the youngest employee ever at 15 years old).

Please feel free to reach out to me via email. You can also find me on twitter, instagram, or linkedin.

Projects 🚀

Some projects I have worked on / am working on.

  • (2020 – Current) Stay tuned 🤫
  • Zipcall (2020) - Peer to peer browser video calling platform with unmatched video quality and latency. 2.8k stars on GitHub with 100k active users. Added support for group calling as a contributor.
  • Kafka NLP (2020) – NLP framework for iOS, including POS tagging and Dependency Parsing, implemented with CoreML.
  • Questo AI (2016-2019) - An AI study assistant which dynamically generates comprehension quizzes based on textbooks and websites
  • Photonify (2017) - An iOS camera which suggests better compositions in real time
  • Photography (2014- Present)
  • Hequals (2017) - An automatic human resource allocator which aims to eliminate any form of discrimination in the tech world by basing decisions purely on skills.
  • Komme (2015) - A virtual navigation game to find ways to get to a certain location only through Google Streetview - made with js.
  • RealAR - Created a prototype iOS framework for creating shared AR environement between multiple devices through socket. (BUT Apple ended up including it in their ARKit on iOS12 in June)
  • Kanji Frequency (2018) - Visualising and ordering kanjis in order of importance to learn only the important ones :)

Achievements and Experiences 🏆

  • Lead organiser of YouthHacks 2019, partnered with Google, Reactor School and the Singaporean government, attracted amazing mentors and judges from Google, StartupX, Temasek Holdings and more. With $5000 funding from National Youth Council, we sponsored more than 180 students a weekend full of coding and seminars.
  • Won $40,000 for the "Most Creative" prize at Startup Weekend - the most prestegious hackathon in SG.
  • Lead organiser of ideaHacks_ 2018, partnered with StartupX, Acronis and Carousell, attracted amazing mentors and judges from CitiBank, Temasek Holdings, IBM and more. Around 100 students participated in a weekend full of coding.
  • Winner of PitchIT Competition at SG Fintech Festival 2016
  • Won ideaHacks 2016 with Questo.

  • etc.

  • Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself.
    – Sartre