Building
Things I build outside the lab.
Outside of research, I like to design and ship things end to end. Here are some projects I’m especially proud of.
Actuator
Actuator is a marketplace where AI agents hire real people for real-world work. An assistant can diagnose the problem, but someone still has to turn the wrench. Actuator lets an agent post a structured job on behalf of the person it serves, lets vetted local workers bid with their own price and credentials, ranks the applicants for the person to choose from, and holds payment in escrow until the work is verified. It’s live in Baltimore and expanding city by city, and it’s part of the Fall 2026 Spark Accelerator cohort at Johns Hopkins.
The agent side is a full OAuth 2.1 authorization server with a hosted MCP endpoint, so any assistant that supports remote MCP servers can connect once and then hire within a spending limit the person sets. Anything beyond that grant comes back as a pending approval for the person to sign off on.
Visit actuato.com → · Connect your assistant →
ScanDat
ScanDat AI is an iOS and Apple Watch app I designed, built, and shipped to the App Store. Snap a photo of any flyer, poster, schedule, or screenshot (or paste text), and AI extracts the events and adds them straight to your Apple or Google Calendar.
It’s a full-stack solo project: a native Swift / SwiftUI app (iPhone, Apple Watch, home-screen widgets, and a share extension) backed by a FastAPI service that proxies to a vision-language model for structured event extraction. It also handles Sign in with Apple and Google, StoreKit subscriptions, on-device auto-cropping and live text detection, and duplicate/conflict checks before anything reaches your calendar.