Rishi Shah

About

Schulich Leader Scholar at McMaster University, one of Canada's top 50 entrepreneurial engineers that was awarded $120,000.
Built a novel linear-attention sequence model from scratch in 5,500 lines of pure C++17, trained it on real clinical data to predict hypoglycemia 60 minutes ahead, and proved its kernel runs bit-identically on a $4 chip.
Engineered a biologically inspired recurrent vision model that outperformed MIT's CORNet-S in adversarial robustness across MNIST, CIFAR, and ImageNet100.
Worked with Synaptive Medical and surgeons to develop a surgical-vision system trained on live operating-room data, achieving 95% tool segmentation accuracy for real-time surgical guidance.
Founded Hack49 Global, a worldwide hackathon with over 1,000 participants from 40+ countries, securing $19,000+ in sponsorships.

Projects

CGM-on-Chip

Machine Learning Embedded Systems Healthcare

Linear-attention architecture (S4D + OSDN) reimplemented from scratch in ~5,500 lines of pure C++17: autograd engine, optimizer, multi-threaded trainer, embedded FP32 kernel, and a triple-redundant correctness proof. Trained on real clinical data; runs on a $4 ESP32-S3 in 20% of its RAM to predict hypoglycemia 60 minutes ahead.

From Pixels to Precision

Surgical Vision Healthcare Deep Learning

Partnered with Synaptive Medical and Robarts Research Institute to build surgical-vision AI system achieving 95% tool-segmentation accuracy for real-time guidance. Bronze Medal at Canada-Wide Science Fair for fluorescence-guided surgery support with <0.12s per image processing.

Adversarial Robustness Research

ML Research Adversarial Robustness Computer Vision

Engineered a bio-inspired recurrent vision model achieving 97.82% adversarial robustness, outperforming MIT's CORNet-S across MNIST, CIFAR, and ImageNet100. Integrated learnable prefiltering, gated recurrence, and denoise-scaling without requiring any adversarial training.

Sentinel

Developer Tools Embedded Systems Language Server

First hardware-aware static analyzer for embedded systems performing RAM/Flash estimation, pin-mapping, and 50+ validations before compilation. Built a custom Language Server Protocol integration with VS Code for real-time hardware-intelligent error detection.

AdaptVR

VR Rehab Healthcare Embedded VR

Meta Quest 2 native Unity app for progressive muscle disease rehab. World Labs Gaussian-splat environment loaded as the world, hand-tracked butterfly catching via OVRSkeleton wrist bones, configurable spawn count and motion zone, overextension guardrail, and a singleton-driven score counter + session timer.

Adaptive Learning Robot

Robotics LLMs Embedded Systems

Built a dual-system robot using Cohere LLMs and real-time search that learns new skills instantly from natural language without pre-training. Placed Top 32 out of 256 projects at Hack the North with 2 custom 3-DOF robotic arms executing smooth motions from messy instructions.

Zephyr AI Assistant

Personal AI Productivity Multi-LLM

Keyboard-activated AI assistant with dual interface combining instant popup access and powerful dashboard for seamless workflow integration. Leverages Groq's Llama 3.1 8B for voice commands, intelligent memory, and controls Spotify, weather, news, calendar, and project tracking.

DermAI Medical Assistant

Medical AI Healthcare RAG

Medical AI platform combining DenseNet121 classification trained on 19,000+ DermNet images with RAG-powered chatbot for comprehensive triage. Provides instant dermatological assessment and personalized health guidance through dual AI architecture.

SurgicalToolAR

Mixed Reality Healthcare Surgical Vision

Augmented reality application for surgical tool visualization and training. Interactive AR experience for medical education and surgical workflow enhancement.

Gesture Controlled Robotic Arm

Computer Vision Robotics Embedded Systems

Computer vision-controlled robotic arm responding to hand gestures in real-time using MediaPipe and Arduino. Demonstrates natural human-robot interaction with 6-DOF movement mapped from gesture recognition.