Liam McHugh
I'm an MS in Electrical Engineering at Columbia, with focus in human-machine interfaces. I hold a BS in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley, where I developed a strong foundation in engineering principles and project management.
I'm primarily interested in human-machine interaction, physical intelligence & information networks. I'm also an avid cyclist, climber & hiker. Feel free to reach out with advice, ideas, or just to get outside!
Technical Leadership
Project Manager: Liquid-Powered Rocket
Led a 30+ member student team to develop launch control system and liquid-propulsion flight vehicle.
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Teaching Assistant: Fluid Dynamics
Weekly recitations applying fluid dynamics principles to real-world applications.
Teaching Assistant: Graduate Mechatronics
Lab setup & assistance for advanced mechatronics & microcomputer systems.
Academic Research
AI & Deep Learning Lab, Columbia
Surgical Robotics: Behavioral Kinematics Assessment
Jan 2025 - present
Advisor: Prof. Zoran Kostic & Dr. Filippo Filicori, Northwell Health
- Kinematics-driven intelligence for tele-operated & autonomous surgical robotics behavioral anomaly detection.
- Instructive foundation model: Pretraining on auto-annotated operations with finetuning on instructive semantics.
- Latency cost optimization for adaptive edge task offloading. Information & communication theory fundamentals.
Distributed Energy Resource Management
Goldman School of Public Policy / General Motors Vehicle-to-Grid battery arbitrage strategies using sota ML techniques. Guided deployment policies for commercial & utility EV sectors.
Renewable Energy Resources robust portfolio management for large independent consumer load sites.
Berkeley Laser Thermal Lab
Model Diagnostics of Phase Explosion in Femtosecond Laser Ablation
Ablation event energy transport model & supercontinuum generation methods for pump-probe scattering spectroscopy. Ejecta morphology control w/applications in micromachining, energy catalysis and nanoscale medical treatments.
Engineering Projects
MUSE: User-Sensitive musical Expression
Independent Research, Lead Developer — New York, NY
Activity-Sensitive Generative Music: Fusing physical activity data with local generative audio models for controllable, realtime activity-music generation.
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Neural Guitar Pedal
Wireless headband EMG for neural interface to guitar pedal effects modulation.
Embedded STM32 signal acquisition system w/BLE comms to main pedal unit for real-time ICA & ML-based feature extraction.
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Active Headphones for Selective Source Diarization
Custom-built headphones with voice selectivity for focused learning.
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LLM-Integrated Financial Portfolio Optimization
Iteratively-Convergent News Processing & Price Prediction w/GPT, plugged into Risk-Constrained Portfolio Optimizer.
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Micro-Surgical Suture for Targeted Neurovascular Hemostasis
Autonomously-enabled microgripping suture with integrated flow sensor for neurovascular and ophthalmic surgeries.
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Parabolic Solar-Harvesting Satellite
Satellite prototype with reaction-wheel directional control for space solar and MASER alignment
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Contact Me
Email:
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/liam-s-mchugh
GitHub: github.com/liammchugh
Note: This website is under construction from base HTML. Feel free to contact me with site recommendations.