◉ Rishik Chakraborty

student · developer · problem solver — 43.46°N 80.52°W

Excited to meet you.

I’m Rishik — a student and developer headed to Software Engineering at the University of Waterloo. I build agentic AI systems, write plain-English walkthroughs of ML papers, and compete in math and programming contests.

Read the writing →
Tom Thomson, The West Wind (1916–17)
Tom Thomson — The West Wind, 1916–17Georgian Bay, Ontario
rishik@waterloo — zsh

~/experience

Agentic Intelligence Intern · Cimba.ai

May 2025 - Sept 2025 · Remote/Seattle

Company's only high school intern. Developing agentic processing pipelines for customer data.

AI Software Engineering Intern · MotionShark

Jun 2025 - Sept 2025 · Remote/San Francisco

Working on integrating customer feedback directly into our digital tutor site. Specifically working on the AI whiteboard mechanism.

Chief Technology Officer · FinTech Nexus

Sept 2024 - Present · Remote

Leading software engineering initiatives and technology strategy for the organization. Lead developer of fintechnexus.ca

Frontend Developer · Zeuty

Jun 2024 - Sep 2024 · Waterloo, ON · Remote

Developed mobile applications using React Native, TypeScript, and Expo Go.

~/education

University of Waterloo, Honors Software Engineering (BSE)

2026 - 2031 · Waterloo, ON

Incoming Student. President's Scholarship of Distinction: Awarded for academic excellence ($2,500 entrance award + $1,500 research grant)

St. Marcellinus (Grade 12)

2021 - 2026 · Mississauga, ON

Top 6 Average: 98.25%

Highest mark in several subjects.
President of Computer Science Club. President of DECA (4 year executive). Math club executive

~/projects

Neural audio retrieval engine — a semantic Ctrl+F for sound. Maps raw waveforms into a 512-dimensional embedding space with LAION-CLAP so you can search unstructured audio for sonic signatures (glass shattering, sirens, a spoken phrase) instead of just transcripts.

FastAPIPostgreSQLpgvectorLAION-CLAPFaster-WhisperlibrosaPyTorchscikit-learnDocker
4 key features
  • · Hybrid search: pgvector cosine ANN over CLAP embeddings fused with Postgres full-text and trigram matching on Faster-Whisper transcripts
  • · Multi-resolution DSP pipeline — onset-detected 500ms slices plus 3s speech tiers, with silence pruning and peak normalization
  • · Query ensembling (up to 7 phrasings, original weighted 2×) with per-tier distance gates and non-maximum suppression for precise temporal hits
  • · 3D corpus map: PCA down from 512D plus K-Means clustering, flagging 95th-percentile acoustic outliers
CareBridgeTerrahacks

AI-powered post-operative recovery assistant that helps patients find nearby pharmacies and manage their recovery after surgery.

Next.js 15React 19TypeScriptTailwind CSSPython FlaskMongoDBGoogle Maps API
4 key features
  • · Pharmacy Locator with Google Maps integration (5-10km radius)
  • · Rating and hours display with prescription upload support
  • · AI Check-in System using Gemini AI (Coming Soon)
  • · Medication tracking and symptom detection
AutoAlertStarterHacks 2024

Security application that detects car theft and automatically sends alerts to police and car owners with customizable daily protection features.

Mobile DevelopmentSecurity APIsNotification Systems
4 key features
  • · Real-time theft detection system
  • · Automatic police and owner notifications
  • · Customizable security settings
  • · Car information management dashboard
SafeConnectionsHawkHacks (Wilfrid Laurier University)

Innovative messaging platform using unsupervised machine learning to detect and prevent child trafficking attempts, targeting Southern African countries.

HTMLCSSJavaScriptReact.jsNode.jsPythonGoogle Sheets APITwiliosklearnMachine Learning
4 key features
  • · ML-powered trafficking detection algorithms
  • · Parent notification system for suspicious activity
  • · Secure messaging platform for children
  • · Real-time threat assessment and alerts
SmartSeedJamHacks8

Agricultural solution that analyzes plant deficiencies to revitalize soil quality, helping communities diagnose crop issues efficiently during climate challenges.

FlaskFull-stack DevelopmentData AnalysisAgricultural APIs
4 key features
  • · Plant deficiency analysis dashboard
  • · Soil quality assessment tools
  • · Nutrient data visualization
  • · Community-focused agricultural insights
More on GitHub →

~/honors

Canadian Computing Competition (CCC)

Senior Top 5% Distinction (Score: 43)

February 2025

CMIMC (Carnegie Mellon Informatics and Mathematics Competition)

Rank 23 internationally

April 2025

Jane Street Estimation Competition

4th Place out of 185 competitors

April 2025

AIME Qualification

AMC 12B (2024, 2025 Top 10% globally).

February 2025

Grade 12 Euclid Mathematics Contest

65 (Highest in School + Written one year)

April 2024

Grade 11 Fermat Mathematics Contest

128 (Top 7% internationally)

February 2024

AP Calculus BC

Score: 5

May 2025

AP Scholar with Distinction

Completed 9 AP Exams (5,5,5,5,4,4,4,3,3)

May 2024

~/writing

Quantization damage is precision-dependent and capability-asymmetric. Component-sensitivity work ranks; it does not test.

August 8, 2026 · 40 min read · PDF

4-bit quantization really is nearly free — but at 3 bits both long-context retrieval and multi-step arithmetic break, and retrieval takes 3.2× the standardized damage. Eight components get better when you quantize them. And the standard way of ranking which layers matter turns out to fail four separate statistical tests. A plain-English walkthrough of the paper, with every figure and number intact.

How Quantization Works

August 2, 2026 · 22 min read

How a thirty-gigabyte AI model gets rounded down to fit on a laptop — scale and zero-point, calibration, granularity, integer-only inference, QAT, and the outlier problem that forced large language models to invent new tricks.

All writing →

~/volunteering

Program Lead + Head Secretary

For The Love of Reading (Brampton) · Sep 2022 - Present · Mississauga, ON

Empowering disadvantaged students through education.

Teacher

Taught my own grade 4 class. · September 2022 - January 2023 · Remote

Mentoring young students to find their passions for math.

Speaker

TEDxMcFarren Boulevard Youth · July 2025 · Remote

Challenged my audience's intuition with tricky puzzles. Watch here

Speaker

HealthCareCoding · September 2022 · Remote

Spoke about quantum computing to 100+ live viewers.

~/certifications

Open to internships, research, and good conversations.

Tom Thomson, Northern River (1914–15)
Tom Thomson — Northern River, 1914–15Algonquin Park, Ontario