Arnav Pandey






Arnav Pandey at UCI

Who am I?


I am a Freshman at UC Irvine studying Computer Science!

I have a passion for AI, machine learning, and embedded systems. I've worked on software development ranging from simple web development to computer vision and recommendation systems, I am also a big fan of hackathon organization.

Outside of coding, I enjoy biking, movies, eating food, and working on projects that solve real-world problems. I'm also a Regents Scholar and part of UCI's Campuswide Honors Collegium.


Internships

  • First American - Incoming Software Engineer Intern at First American for Summer 2025
  • Surf Social - Helped develop an AI-powered recommendation system using RoBERTa, BLIP, and zero-shot classification. Integrated Firebase Firestore and contributed to classifiers for context and political bias detection.
  • ezML - Trained YOLOv8 and YOLOworld models for swimmer stance detection using PyTorch and Ultralytics. Used Google Colab for training and integrated models with RunPod for serverless inference.
  • Super Purposes - Used knowledge of Web Developing (HTML, CSS, JS) to work with a team of web developers at Super Purposes to help develop and maintain the Super Purposes website, as well as create the course pages.

Hackathon Organizer

  • BitHacks 2025 - Director of logisitcs team to plan out social events, prizes, workshops, meals, and lead applications of UC Irvine's first ever embedded systems hackathon.

  • IrvineHacks 2025 - Part of the logistics committee and led the team formation and social events subcommittee to create team formation, gaming tournament, and photobooth social events at the hackathon.

  • Git Init 2023 - Organized a hackathon that had over 330 participants, had 56 submissions, and had over $100,000 in prizes. Is the largest highschool student-hosted hackathon of 2023 as of January 7th, 2023.

  • Tech Optimum Hacks - Organized a hackathon that had over 300 participants and over $40,000 in prizes. Hackathon included over 60 teams and ~50 submissions, was the largest High School Hackathon of July 2022.

  • Cal Hacks - Organized an in-person hackathon that had over 45 participants and $1000 worth in prizes. The hackathon was sponsored by the San Ramon Valley Education Fund and partnered with clubs like CHTC and CSHS.

  • Epoch Bay Area - Organized an in-person hackathon at Circuit Launch that had over 50 participants and was a satellite hackathon running alongside Epoch in New Delhi, Epoch Texas, and Epoch VT

Judging and Mentoring

  • LaunchHacks ii - Helped hackers on providing constructive feedback to projects and answering questions regarding programming or the hackathon.

  • Bay Area Hacks Society - Helped hackers debug and solve problems that consisted in their projects, also provided feedback to the projects.

  • Bay Area Hacks Society - Judged projects that were created by participants and scored based on a given rubric, judged about 30 projects and provided scores.

  • Unlock Hacks - Leveraged experience from hackathons and personal projects to guide hackers and give feedback on all projects and ratings to determine the winners.

  • GunnHacks 8.0 - Guided hackers and gave feedback on projects in GunnHacks 8.0. Helped hackers out with bugs and problems.

Achievements

STATE FINALIST - CALIFORNIA


🏅: 5 🥈: 4 🥉: 1, Total: 10

2nd Place - Built a web application that locates nearby vaccination clinics from a list of nearby 300,000 locations US-wide, projects current and historical data about COVID cases, deaths, and vaccination percentages. More Info


Award: Best Environmental Hack - Built a web application with Machine Learning and AI to determine when the world will reach dangerous levels of CO2 based on data from multiple research centers. More Info


Award: Best Education Hack - Competed against high school and college students worldwide. Built a web application that made learning easier by connecting mentors and students with an easily navigable UI. More Info


Award: 2nd Place - Built a web application that generates lists of movie and tv-show recommendations for the user to watch based on movie genre, movie release date, minimum rating out of 10, and language.More Info


Award: Best Website Application Built a web application that promoted escapism by implementing APIs that allows the user to get new ideas, be entertained or learn new things.More Info


Award: Second Place Built a web application that took weather data from the user's location from the National Weather Service API and recommended clothing from a dataset of clothing to the user.More Info


Award: Second Place, Award: Best Creative Use of Twilio, built a web application that analyses the symptoms reported by the user and presents the most likely illness based on those symptoms using a custom-built, advanced AI. More Info


Award: Third Place, Award: Best Website Application, built a completely AI-based application whose goal is to make sure you are able to reach your fitness goals while also maintaining physical and mental equillibrium. More Info