Upamanyu (Upi) Shanker
CS, Finance & Math Student · Research Assistant · Software Engineer Intern · CTO
- Software Engineer Intern @ FSU Information Technology Services
- Research Assistant @ FSU
- Analytics Intern @ St. Jude Children's Research Hospital
About
I'm a CS and Finance student at Florida State who likes problems with a measurable answer. I've trained a C++ reinforcement-learning agent over 2M episodes and chased down the reward-shaping bug that was costing it 40% of its expected value, indexed every NBA player-game in league history behind a ranked search API, and shipped a file-transfer app that never lets bytes touch my server. Right now I'm a software engineer intern at FSU ITS, an AI engineer intern at St. Jude, a research assistant at FSU, and CTO at Campus Sublet.
Education
Florida State University — Dual Degree B.S. Computer Science and Finance, Minor in Mathematics (Expected May 2028)
Honors & Awards
- National Merit Finalist
- AP Scholar with Distinction
- Vires Scholarship
- Dean’s List
Browse this site as a shell — type help to start.
click the canvas · space or ↑ to jump · ↓ to duck
Experience
Campus Sublet
Chief Technology Officer · March 2026 – Present
- Launched a mobile sublet marketplace for FSU students, scaling to 150+ users on React Native/Expo + Supabase.
- Built real-time messaging, push notifications, and email-verified auth across iOS and Android.
- Designed the end-to-end data architecture: 5+ tables with row-level security for listings, chats, and photos.
Florida State University Information Technology Services
Software Engineer Intern · August 2025 – Present
- Built a searchable Java (GWT) directory of every internet domain FSU owns and its security contacts, speeding security incident response.
- Building a check-in system for user visits and appointment scheduling across university departments.
- Delivered multiple department applications end-to-end, cutting manual processing time by 57%.
St. Jude Children's Research Hospital
AI Engineer Intern · June 2025 – July 2026
- Delivered clinical reports by querying the Epic EHR system (used by ~60% of hospitals in the US).
- Trained a custom AI model that turns natural-language prompts into dashboards for clinical teams, cutting reporting time by 43%.
- Automated reporting workflows over patient and operational data in Python and SQL, improving accuracy.
Florida State University
Research Assistant · Oct 2024 – Present
- Developed a Python script to categorize duplicate titles in a SQLite database, reducing manual data entry by 75% and automating CSV report generation.
- Created a SQLite database using NLP and TF-IDF vectorization to automatically analyze and score academic papers, and deployed a Flask web application that queries the database.
Commerce Hive LLC
Software Engineer Intern · Feb 2025 – Jun 2025
- Developed modular and accessible front-end components using TypeScript and Next.js, enhancing user workflows.
- Integrated RESTful API endpoints to fetch and update inventory data, implementing robust error handling.
- Optimized front-end performance, reducing initial page load time by 52% through dynamic imports, image optimization, and caching strategies.
Outlier / Alignerr
AI Trainer · Oct 2024 – May 2025
- Improved AI performance and accuracy by designing effective prompts and refining LLM responses, ensuring alignment with user needs and project goals.
- Annotated and labeled video datasets to train and enhance AI model performance, ensuring high-quality data for accurate training and validation.
- Developed and optimized code implementing machine learning models, conducting rigorous evaluation to identify biases and improve performance.
Voxel Labs, LLC
Front-End Web Developer · Feb 2025 – May 2025
- Designed and developed a responsive website using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, ensuring seamless navigation across devices.
- Integrated interactive elements such as form validation and real-time updates, enhancing functionality and user experience.
- Deployed and secured the site on AWS: S3 hosting, Route 53 DNS, CloudFront CDN, ACM SSL, and API Gateway + Lambda for backend functionality.
Beats by Dre
Data Analytics Extern · Nov 2024 – Feb 2025
- Developed and automated data pipelines for gathering, cleaning, and analyzing large consumer datasets using Python.
- Conducted exploratory and sentiment analysis on customer reviews with pandas and NumPy to uncover actionable insights.
- Created data-driven presentations and interactive dashboards communicating complex insights to stakeholders.
Leadership
Asian American Student Union
Programming Coordinator · June 2026 – Present
Management Leadership for Tomorrow
Career Prep Fellow · January 2026 – Present
- Selected for a competitive 18-month leadership development program with structured coaching and mentorship.
Lambda Phi Epsilon
Webmaster & Events Chair · June 2026 – Present
- Coordinate chapter events and maintain the fraternity website, driving member turnout.
CompNeuroSociety at FSU
Vice President & Webmaster · May 2025 – May 2026
- Oversaw society operations and strategic planning as Vice President, developed and maintained org website.
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) at FSU
Webmaster · August 2025 – May 2026
- Maintained ACM at FSU's WordPress site for 1000+ members, handling content, plugins, and security.
FSU Association of IT Professionals (AITP)
Outreach Chair · Aug 2025 – May 2026
- Organized and represented AITP at campus outreach events, driving interest in professional development within IT.
- Strengthened alumni-student connections by coordinating an alumni interview segment and streamlining event RSVPs.
Projects
Six I’d be happy to walk through line by line, and the rest below.
Blackjack AI
C++17 blackjack engine with Q-Learning and Monte Carlo agents trained over 2M episodes, playing within ~0.01 units per hand of optimal basic strategy after diagnosing and fixing reward-shaping and learning-rate defects worth ~40% of expected value. Compiles to WebAssembly via Emscripten, so the interactive demo runs entirely in the browser with no backend.
Statline
Search every NBA player-game in league history by stat range ("20–30 pts, 10–15 ast, 5–10 reb"), with results ranked by closeness to the requested ranges through a dynamically generated SQL expression. SQLite database ingested from stats.nba.com, served read-only behind a Next.js API route and deployed as a Docker image with a persistent volume.
Cargo Search
Microservice freight-search platform: Spring Boot shipment and carrier services backed by PostgreSQL, a real-time indexing pipeline over Kafka, and an ElasticSearch query layer. Batch analytics and reindexing run on Apache Spark, with every service isolated in its own Docker container.
Shuttle
Moves files and text between your laptop and phone — scan a QR code once, then push either direction. Browsers upload straight to Cloudflare R2 through presigned URLs and access runs on stateless HMAC-signed tokens, so bytes never touch the server and there is no database at all.
GradeHub
Full-stack grade database with a Next.js frontend and Spring Boot backend over PostgreSQL. Computes GPA and predicts the grades needed to hit a target, with two-factor auth, Google OAuth, and per-student data persistence.
FSU Crime Map
Daily-updated interactive map of FSU police crime-log incidents. A Python pipeline scrapes, deduplicates, and geocodes FSU PD's rolling 60-day log into a growing historical dataset, published as a static Leaflet site with filters, search, a sortable table, and stats. Refreshed automatically by GitHub Actions — no server, no API keys.
Also built (+6)
- Clash Royale Stats Tracker · Next.js, Express.js, TypeScript, Tailwind
React/Next.js frontend with a Node/Express backend that fetches and visualizes player profiles, achievements, badges, and battle logs from the official API.Live demo →Source available on request - Real Estate MLS · SQL, PHP, MariaDB
MySQL-backed PHP application to search, view, and query property listings, with a complete relational schema and dynamic pages. Built for a Database Systems course. - YT → Tagged MP3 · TypeScript, Python
Converts YouTube videos into MP3s with proper ID3 tags and cover art. - Outlook–Google Calendar Sync · Python, Microsoft Graph API, Google Calendar API, SQLite
One-way syncs multiple Outlook calendars to Google Calendar, handling recurring events, color coding, and duplicate prevention via a SQLite tracking database.Source available on request - NLP Paper Scoping Tool · Python, NLP, SQLite, Flask
TF-IDF and SQLite pipeline with a Flask UI to score and filter academic papers, with automated duplicate detection. Built for FSU research.Source available on request - FloridaOpenGov Visualizations · Tableau, Data Visualization
Interactive Tableau visualizations of Florida economic, school, and housing data for transparency projects.Source available on request