"NICOLE SUMMER HSING"

Education

Carnegie Mellon University

B.S. in Cognitive Science
Concentration in Artificial Intelligence

Minors in Computer Science & Neural Computation

2019 - 2022

Academic Projects

  • Short-Term Persistent Spiking Buffer: Entorhinal Cortex Computational Model
  • AI Image Encoder: Multi-layer Perceptron Neural Network
  • DeepFake Detector: Deep Learning Convolutional Neural Network
  • Automatic Voice Age Estimator: Support Vector Regression Model
  • Network Intrusion Detector: Machine Learning Decision Tree Classifier
  • Handwritten Digit Encoding: Associative Memory Hopfield Neural Network
  • Handwritten Digit Encoding: Restricted Boltzmann Machine

    • Key Classes

    • Computational Models of Neural Systems (Graduate Level)
    • Neural Computation (Graduate Level)
    • Neural Signal Processing (Graduate Level)
    • Introduction to Parallel Distributive Processing (Graduate Level)
    • Computational Forensics and Artificial Intelligence (Graduate Level)
    • Cognitive Neuropsychology (Graduate Level)
    • The Psychology and Neuroscience of Consciousness
    • The core CS classes @ CMU lol (up to 15-213)

    Current

    Arcarae

    Arcarae

    Consumer AI

    June 2024 - August 2024, October 2024 - Now

    Download Now <3

    AI introspection & self-discovery app that helps you think through your life, values, world view, and self.


    Skills Learned: How to listen to myself, become opinionated & confident, and build with intuition & conviction


    i am the CEO / solo do-it-all founder / sole creator / whatever-you-want-to-call-it lol. i do everything myself from coding to marketing to product to design. <3

    Independent Researcher

    AI, Cognition, Intelligent Systems, & Consciousness

    2024 - Present

    Investigating the first principles of consciousness, intelligence, and cognition to uncover universal computational laws that govern all intelligent systems, developing architectures that demonstrate these fundamental mechanisms across both biological and artificial substrates.

    Focus Areas: Conversational AI alignment, cognitive architectures, inner monologue in LLMs, AI safety, human-AI co-exploration, reflection & reasoning systems, Consciousness & Intelligence


    Latest Paper: MIRROR - Cognitive Inner Monologue LLM architecture achieving 21% avg performance improvement across SOTA models with up to 156% gains in critical safety scenarios

    Past Products

    Cleo

    Cleo

    Consumer AI

    March 2024 - June 2024

    Stage Reached: Beta

    Friendly AI companion for everyday mental struggles, advice, and support.

    Skills Learned: Building scalable and production ready LLM apps, fine-tuning LLMs, frameworks for fast feedback -> shipping -> production, lots of research into transformers in general, human interaction x AI, AI alignment, and AI interpretability

    Memento

    Memento

    Consumer Social

    December 2023 - March 2024

    Stage Reached: Beta

    Social media platform for creating AI-generated montages out of multiple images and memories.

    Skills Learned: First time learning about Stable Diffusion (incl. research & foundational stuff), building scalable and production ready stable diffusion apps, LORAs, building production AI apps in general, a bunch of consumer social research into mimetics, psychology, remixing/social content interaction, and social graphs

    Wanderful

    Wanderful

    Consumer Social

    October 2023 - December 2023

    Stage Reached: Hi-Fi Mockups & Usability Testing

    Gamified consumer social scavengar hunt. Get a prompt everyday to take a picture with a certain object and compete with friends for speed & best photo.

    Learned Skills: All foundational knowledge about UX/UI and design, Figma, competitor research, product management, research in virality, social & knowledge graphs, psychology, network effects, gamification, ect.

    Nexus

    Consumer Social

    August 2023 - October 2023

    This was my first app I ever built. The idea & UI was bad but the learnings were phenomenal lol

    Learned Skills: How to build an app from scratch and deploy to production, database / systems design, learned app & web dev with 0 previous knowledge

    My smol time in corporate lol

    Backend Software Engineer

    Twilio

    July 2022 - August 2023

    I worked on Twilio's messaging team & APIs

    Learned Skills: Basically translating what I learned in CS classes into backend systems for real world products (APIs, distributed systems, database management, cloud infra, performance optimization, server + app logic, security, ect)