Simba Shi
Hey, I'm Simba. I'm a student at Yale, and I love building AI and robots.
Previously, I cofounded ReefSound, an AI and robotics startup for ocean monitoring scaled across 7 countries, featured by The Independent, NASA, United Nations, and National Geographic.
My current research spans multimodal foundation models, scalable oversight, mechanistic interpretability, and I'm interested broadly in intelligence in both its digital and biological forms.
In another life, I'm a creative writer. Here, you'll find small, scattered fragments of my life & work.
Tractable
May 2026 – PresentML Intern · Series E, $1B valuation
MLOps and research at one of UK's top computer vision unicorns.
Yale Graph & Geometric Learning Lab
Mar 2026 – PresentUndergraduate Researcher
LLM post-training and RL for multimodal time-series reasoning.
SPAR Research
Feb 2026 – PresentAI Alignment Research Fellow
Activation steering in chain-of-thought LLM obfuscation with MIT and ex-Meta researchers.
ReefSound
Jul 2023 – Aug 2025Co-Founder
Audio AI & underwater robotics for automating ocean monitoring. Deployed in 7 countries. Featured by The Independent, NASA, National Geographic.
Greyparrot
Jul 2024 – Sep 2024ML Engineer Intern · Series B, $30M raised
Computer vision and YOLOv8 inference pipelines for industrial recycling.
CVSSP Lab, University of Surrey
Jun 2023 – Feb 2025ML Research Intern · #1 ranked computer vision lab in UK
GANs for zero-shot image translation; seq2seq transformers and graph convolutional networks for audio captioning.
Learning Conserved Quantities in Neural Simulators and Diffusion Models
May 2026Trained neural nets to discover Hamiltonian physics; showed that low rollout MSE and physical conservation are orthogonal: diffusion energy drift is 7,500–36,000× ground truth.
Optimized Quantum Cat Qubit Reed-Solomon & Tornado Codes
Jan 2026MIT iQuHack 1st Place 2026: Alice & Bob
Novel quantum error correction algorithm; Tornado architecture combining Reed-Solomon codes and repetition stabilizers for cat qubits.
AEGIS: Pareto-Optimal Safe Pedestrian Navigation via Heuristic NAMOA* Pathfinding
Sep 2025PennApps 1st Place 2025: Best Use of Statistics
Reduced NAMOA* pathfinding runtime from O(N³) to O(N log N) via skyline pruning and cardinality bounding.
Towards a Novel Multi-Loss CycleGAN for Full-to-Flat Colour Transformation
Aug 2023GAN pipeline for zero-shot full-to-flat colour image transformation; CycleGAN augmented with depth geometry (InceptionV3), sketch extractor, and CLIP semantics losses.
Mycoflo: Pleurotus tuber-regium in Heavy Metal Filtration and Machine Learning for Water Potability Testing
Feb 2024Featured by United Nations; The Earth Prize 2024 Finalist (Top 10 of 1000+)
Mycofiltration using native Nigerian fungi + XGBoost/Random Forest ensemble for water potability; 63.75% copper reduction, 94% classification accuracy.