We study whether intrinsic-motivation objectives such as ICM and RND can produce representations that transfer across Procgen tasks, rather than only improving exploration in the source environment.
Hi, I'm Zhafira / Fira!
I am a software engineer with 5+ years of experience. Ex-Garena, Microsoft, and YC startup.
I have 680+ hours in Baldur's Gate 3, 250+ in Dragon's Dogma 2 (not counting the new DLC), and I am currently playing Stardew Valley, because I like optimizing business units and delivering shareholder value.
I love gaming and computer science. Outside of being a software engineer, I am also a graduate student at Brown University studying Computer Science, with Applied Mathematics cross-registration at Harvard University.
Academia-wise, I have worked on research at MIT's McGovern Institute and I am currently doing Reading & Research at the Serre Lab at Brown. The lab works at the intersection of neuroscience, cognitive science, computer vision, and AI, and is part of Brown's broader Carney Institute for Brain Science community.
Publications & Research
Multi-institutional work on machine-learning models for biopsychosocial measurements and psychopathology outcomes across the lifespan.
Experience
Architecting large-scale game analytics and backend systems across PostgreSQL, SQL Server, C#, Redis, and production monitoring. Recent work includes pipelines processing 900M+ time-series records annually, bulk aggregation jobs with ~100× speedups, cross-platform game analytics APIs, and resilient distributed worker infrastructure.
Designed and prototyped intelligent in-game agents for RPG environments, including companions, enemies, and bosses. Worked on FSM- and RL-based decision systems, adaptive combat behaviors, simulation environments, and runtime profiling for large-scale encounters.
Worked across deployment, DevOps, backend, and full-stack software engineering for Palantir Peptides, a platform for collecting and growing self-reported peptide research data. Responsible for production deployment and platform engineering across the application stack.
Built and refined hotel-data pipelines, scraping infrastructure, vector-database architecture, embedding workflows, and clustering systems for semantic search and intelligent recommendations.
Developed ETL pipelines and a data-lake architecture across multiple data sources, with stakeholder-facing API dashboards and operational observability.
Led a 14-person intern team delivering weekly Data & AI projects, including sentiment analysis, competitor intelligence, ML-Ops suitability assessment, and property-price prediction pipelines.
Worked on fraudulent-transaction monitoring and data transformation, improving transaction-checking accuracy to above 85% while supporting operational response workflows.
Awards
Lead engineer for GoGuard, an AI companion concept for passenger safety during rides.
Built a multimodal diagnostic chatbot designed to reduce LLM hallucinations.
Proposed accessible automotive technology for people with disabilities through Project Nakama.
Proposed an “AI as human accompanist” concept following the emergence of Transformer models.
First-batch scholarship recipient; maintained a GPA above 3.50 throughout undergraduate study.