Karsten Lowe

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October 11, 2026

Beyond the Box Score: Measuring Individual Impact in NCAA Division I Women's Volleyball

Work Experience

June 2026 – August 2026

Machine Learning & AI Engineer

GelTech Labs · San Diego, CA
- Cut data-curation time 95% across 300+ open-source research datasets by engineering an agentic LLM ingestion platform (dual-container Docker microservices) that standardizes them into a unified research corpus.
- Architected a reconciliation framework that fuses inverse-variance weighted statistical signals (kNN OOD detection, conformal intervals) with a local Llama 3.2 reasoning layer, benchmarked against a custom ground-truth harness to establish where traditional ML and generative-AI fusion each win.
June 2026 – August 2026

Software Engineer

Laxcen Technologies · Laguna Hills, CA
- Eliminated manual tracking for overseas logistics with real-time visibility into 2,000,000+ RFID inlays, by engineering a containerized Next.js tracking application on AWS ap-east-1 to cut international latency.
- Fully automated sales quoting to bypass manual finance approvals, cutting 1–2 days of turnaround from each of 100+ quotes, with a PostgreSQL price database using the Frankfurter API for live USD/CNY rates.
- Overhauled technical SEO across Laxcen's 76-page site: meta descriptions, HTML parsability, and crawl errors.
January 2026 – Present

Lead Data Scientist

UCSD Women's Volleyball (NCAA Division I) · San Diego, CA
- Generate schedule-adjusted win probabilities for 1,000+ Division I athletes, removing team-composition bias from player evaluation, with an ensemble of a RidgeCV RAPM baseline and an XGBoost touch-level model.
- Automated ingestion of 270,000+ match events: a headless UI-navigation agent scrapes .dvw files and a custom Python ETL pipeline cleans and loads them into PostgreSQL.
- Speed up transfer-portal scouting for the coaching staff with automatically generated video highlights and stats.
- Experimenting with a recurrent neural network (RNN) in-game predictor that forecasts an opponent's next attack from live data.
March 2026 – Present

Freelance Full-Stack Developer

Self-employed · Remote
- Built and launched setapartgrooming.com, a website and membership platform for a grooming studio serving 3,000+ clients: a three.js 3D scroll experience, end-to-end Stripe Checkout with subscription webhooks, passwordless magic-link sign-in, and an owner revenue dashboard (Next.js, PostgreSQL).
- Gave the Set Apart owner a dashboard logging subscription usage and reporting income across daily to yearly views, and analyzed a 3,000+ client Booksy dataset to drive SMS marketing segmentation, local SEO, and pricing.
- Shipped polishtooperfect.com for an auto-detailing business, engineering the local-SEO layer end to end (LocalBusiness JSON-LD, canonical URLs, generated sitemaps) with a build-time guard that holds unfinished pages at noindex.
- Reverse-engineered scattered client catalogues into a typed single-source-of-truth content layer (service tiers, pricing, a roughly 1,000-asset media manifest served via CloudFront), tested with Vitest and Playwright.

Projects

October 2026

Articulate

An AI speech therapist for deaf and hard-of-hearing learners, built as a team. Live speech maps onto a 2D grid for game-like practice, and a 3D point-cloud avatar remembers each learner's difficulties and demonstrates pronunciation with synchronized lip and tongue animations. GPU acceleration cut phoneme inference time 52% on Apple M4, and Koel Labs speech recognition runs on RunPod in Docker, so live visual feedback never waits on the GPT-based coaching.

Python
PyTorch
React
TypeScript
Docker

Devpost →

April 2026 – Present

CarbinWatcher

3rd place at UCSD DataHacks 2026: a serverless cloud backend for a computer-vision smart trash can that tells users which bin to use. Streams MQTT through AWS IoT Core, Kinesis Firehose, and S3 (with parallel DynamoDB writes) into a live React/Next.js app, with Databricks + XGBoost analytics predicting environmental impact. Designed to scale to 1,000+ cans; demoed on our one prototype.

Python
C++
React
AWS

Read project overview → Live demo → Devpost →

March 2026 – Present

KLMathPrep

A full-stack AWS web app that autonomously manages multiple tutors, 20+ students, and parents for my tutoring business: video explanations, notes, Cognito authentication, scheduling, and live reads of sign-ups and progress. Python Lambda functions (triggered by EventBridge) send SES confirmation, cancellation, and reminder emails before each appointment.

React
Next.js
TypeScript
AWS

Read project overview → Visit site →

April 2026 – June 2026

UCSD Smart Analyst

A PostgreSQL-integrated AI agent over 270,000+ volleyball points for the UCSD coaching staff: an OpenAI agent collects VolleyMetrics data through the UCSD portal, then cleans and loads it into Neon. Custom Python tools run validated SQL with schema introspection and a query-correctness check, returning team-specific stats and Plotly visualizations general-purpose LLMs can't match.

Python
React
PostgreSQL

Read project overview →

Skills

Languages

Python
TypeScript
JavaScript
Java
C/C++
R
SQL
HTML/CSS

ML & AI

PyTorch
TensorFlow
scikit-learn
XGBoost
LightGBM
OpenCV
Gaussian Processes
LLMs & agentic workflows
RAG & function-calling
OpenAI API

Cloud & Data

AWS · Solutions Architect
S3
Lambda
DynamoDB
Kinesis
EC2
RDS
API Gateway
Step Functions
EventBridge
SES
Cognito
Amplify
IoT Core
Route 53
IAM
VPC
PostgreSQL · Neon
pgvector
Prisma
Databricks
Azure
MQTT

Frameworks & Libraries

React
Next.js
Node.js
FastAPI
REST APIs
WebSockets
pytest
JUnit
pandas
NumPy
Plotly

Developer Tools

Git & GitHub
Docker
Linux
CI/CD · GitHub Actions
Vercel
AI-assisted dev · Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot

Education

Sep 2025 – June 2028

B.S. Data Science

University of California, San Diego

La Jolla, CA · 4.00 / 4.00 GPA

January 25, 2026

AWS Solutions Architect – Associate

Amazon Web Services

Cloud architecture certification

Leadership

August 2026 – Present

Resident Assistant

UC San Diego, Residence Life · La Jolla, CA
- Direct community operations and logistics for 2,400+ UC San Diego residents, collaborating with a cross-functional staff of 80+ on large-scale event programming and budget allocation.
- Advise residents, mediate conflicts, run community programming, and serve an on-call rotation for after-hours incidents.
August 2026 – Present

AWS Technical Lead

AWS Student Builder Group at UC San Diego · La Jolla, CA
- Founding member of UC San Diego's official AWS-affiliated builder chapter, grown to 200+ active student members.
- Designed and taught an applied AWS curriculum: cloud ML and generative-AI workflows with Amazon SageMaker and Bedrock AgentCore, alongside serverless foundations in IAM, S3, Lambda, and Amplify.

Get in touch

Let's Connect

I'm open to internships, research, and collaborations, especially in machine learning, data, and full-stack work. Send a note and I'll get back to you.

Karsten Lowe KARSTENLOWE