David Munechika
Stamps President's Scholar at Georgia Tech
I'm a master's candidate in Computer Science and Stamps President's Scholar at the Georgia Institute of Technology with a degree specialization in Machine Learning.
I have strong proficiencies in both object-oriented and functional programming languages including Java, Javascript, Typescript, Python, and Elixir. I have experience building web and mobile applications as a full-stack developer in an agile environment, using various web frameworks (React, Node, Express, Phoenix), database management systems (PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Firebase), cloud computing services (AWS, GCP), and container management systems (Docker, Kubernetes). My past research experience involves deep learning for computer vision applications, geospatial data science and visualization, and natural language processing.
I have collaborated with designers, developers, engineers, and scientists while working at Apple, Amazon, Cypress, and Stord.
Education
Present — Aug. 2021
M.S. in Computer Science (Machine Learning)
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
GPA: 4.00/4.00
May 2023 — Aug. 2020
B.S. in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence & Information Internetworks)
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
GPA: 4.00/4.00, Stamps President's Scholar, CREATE-X Scholar
June 2020 — Sep. 2016
High School Diploma
Fairport High School, Fairport, NY
GPA: 99.85/100, Rank: 1/485, Valedictorian, Student Wall of Distinction
Industry Experience
Present — May 2023
Apple, Cupertino, CA
Software Engineering Intern, Proactive ML
Mentor:
Markus Berget
Maintaining and developing core on-device machine learning models and user-facing features on iOS.
Aug. 2022 — May 2022
Amazon, Seattle, WA
Software Development Engineering Intern, AWS EC2
Mentor:
Chirabrata Senapati,
Matthew Lewis
Software development engineering intern contributing to the backend development and scaling of AWS EC2 and VPC technologies. Built packages using native AWS services such as Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Elastic Container Service (ECS), Fargate, Cloudwatch, Cloudformation, and Cloud Development Kit (CDK).
May. 2022 — Sep. 2021
Cypress.io, Atlanta, GA
Software Development Intern, Cypress App Team
Mentor:
Jennifer Shehane
Cypress is the world's best automated test runner, with over 17 million downloads and users in over 90 countries. Worked across the stack to implement new features and fix bugs in the Cypress test runner; closely collaborated with product and design teams on product specifications; contributed to the development, refinement, and hardening of the major Cypress v10 unification release. Served as the support rotation engineer responsible for triaging new issues, fixing regressions, surfacing high-priority bugs, and engaging with the open-source community. Created a repository of web hooks for automating ClickUp actions to streamline product management processes; integrated CI/CD with Vercel and Github Actions, code coverage with Codecov, and distributed tracing with Honeycomb.
Aug. 2021 — May 2021
Stord, Atlanta, GA
Software Engineering Intern, Apollo
Mentor:
Adam Kauffman
Contributed to both the distributed microservice backend and enterprise frontend architecture, completing agile software development to handle shipper/warehouse inventory management, order orchestration logic, facility activity services, and security compliance. Assisted a team of engineers in spearheading the load testing effort prior to a major software release, optimizing the performance of services to handle over 1.7 million order creations per day.
Research Experience
Present — Aug. 2021
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
Undergraduate Research Assistant, School of Computational Science and Engineering
Advisor:
Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
Member of the Polo Club of Data Science where we bridge and innovate at the intersection of data mining and human-computer interaction to synthesize scalable, interactive, and interpretable tools that amplify human’s ability to understand and interact with big data.
Jul. 2021 — Sep. 2020
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
Undergraduate Research Assistant, Center for Geographic Analysis
Mentor:
Tao Hu
Worked under Dr. Tao Hu at the Center for Geographic Analysis using Python to analyze the geospatial impact of media coverage and reporting on information seeking behavior and the spread of COVID-19. Performed data collection, processing, engineering, and analysis for the Data Science Team, specifically focused on text mining and Natural Language Processing (NLP). Project presented during the third series of an NSF and IAB funded webinar on "Open Spatiotemporal Resources for Fighting COVID-19".
Aug. 2019 — Jul. 2019
Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY
Machine Learning Intern, Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science
Advisor:
Ryne Roady,
Christopher Kanan
Worked as part of the Machine and Neuromorphic Perception Laboratory (a.k.a. kLab) and focused on developing a convolutional deep neural network model which more accurately mimics human learning by synthesizing continual learning and novelty detection capabilities. Research titled "Incremental Open Set Recognition: Exploring Novel Input Detection in Incremental Learning Models” was accepted for poster presentation at the IEEE Image and Signal Processing Conference in Western, New York.
Honors and Awards
2021
Grand Prize Winner @ CREATE-X I2P Showcase
1st Place Winner of Georgia Tech’s Idea-2-Prototype (I2P) Showcase Competition, which featured over 65 innovative startup teams founded by Georgia Tech students.
2020
CREATE-X Scholar
The CREATE-X Scholars program selects 10 students each year from over 1,000 applications. The scholars are holistically selected based on their entrepreneurial spirit and potential.
2020
Stamps President's Scholar
Awarded a full-ride scholarship as 1 of 20 out-of-state recipients from an applicant pool of more than 30,000 students at the Georgia Institute of Technology (represent < 0.1% of applicants). Recipients of the full-ride scholarship are selected based upon holistic excellence and potential within the program’s four pillars: Scholarship, Leadership, Progress, and Service.
2020
Student Hall of Fame Inductee
The Fairport High School Student Hall of Fame exists to annually recognize outstanding Fairport High School students who have achieved distinction in their careers at FHS based on the following criteria: Academics, Extracurriculars, Citizenship, Service, Leadership, and Spirit. Each year no more than 1% of the graduating class may be inducted into the Student Hall of Fame.
2020
Valedictorian
For achieving the highest academic rank in a class of 485 students.
2020
Scholar Athlete of the Year
Awarded to one male and one female varsity athlete each year.
2020
National Merit Scholar
About 1.6 million students enter the National Merit Scholarship competition annually when they take the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT). By the conclusion of the competition, a select group of Finalists are chosen to receive prestigious National Merit Scholarships. Winners are the Finalist candidates judged to have the strongest combination of academic skills and achievements, extracurricular accomplishments, and potential for success in rigorous university studies. Scholarship winners represent fewer than 1% of the initial pool of student entrants.
2019
Notre Dame Junior of the Year
Awarded to one student out of a pool of over 100 area high schools based on exceptional academic accomplishments and excellence in extracurricular activities, community service, and character. The winner was chosen from nine finalists following a breakfast interview with the committee.
Publications
Conference
C4
David Munechika,
Zijie J. Wang,
Jack Reidy,
Josh Rubin,
Krishna Gade,
Krishnaram Kenthapadi,
Duen Horng Chau
IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS). Oklahoma City, OK, USA, 2022.
C3
Zijie J. Wang,
Evan Montoya,
David Munechika,
Haoyang Yang,
Benjamin Hoover,
Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
ACL 2023 (ACL). 2023.
Project
PDF
Code
BibTeX
DOI
#1 Trending Dataset, #2 Most Liked Dataset on HuggingFace
Nominated for Best Paper Award, selected for oral presentation
C2
Zijie J. Wang,
David Munechika,
Seongmin Lee,
Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS). Oklahoma, OK, USA, 2022.
C1
David Munechika,
Ryne Roady,
Christopher Kanan
Western New York Image and Signal Processing Workshop (WNYISPW). Rochester, NY, USA, 2019.
Technology Skills
OS: Mac OS X, Ubuntu, Unix Command Line, Windows
Programming: Python, Java, Javascript, Typescript, HTML, CSS, Swift, Elixir, C
Frameworks and Tools: Node, React, Express, Vue, Phoenix, AWS, GCP, MongoDB, Firebase, SQL, PostgreSQL, D3, Socket.io, Apache Kafka, Cypress, Pandas, NumPy, PyTorch, Git, Docker, Kubernetes, k6, Figma, Jira, Vercel
Service
Reviewer
IEEE Visualization
(VIS)
2022
Member
Present — 2021
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Present — 2021
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Present — 2020
Stamps President's Scholars (SPS)
Present — 2020
CREATE-X Scholars (CREATE-X)
Projects
Aug. 2021 — Mar. 2021
Transcription Powered Note-Taking
Assisted development of a note-taking application with integrated voice transcription. Designed the frontend UI/UX and expanded NLP speech recognition features along with handling database management, audio streams, file transcription, and creation of a backend REST API.
May 2022 — May 2021
Nonprofit Partnership Platform
Created a web application for nonprofits and organizations to discover and build partnerships (1,000+ followers and 750+ clients). Designed and developed the application UI/UX, REST API, intelligent recommendation algorithm, private user-to-user chat, JWT authentication system, and backend architecture. Acquired Havn Connect: a platform that connects nonprofit organizations with volunteers. Awarded Grand Prize at the Spring 2021 CREATE-X I2P Showcase, featuring 65+ innovative startup teams.
References
Dr. Polo Chau, Associate Professor
School of Computational Science and Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
Chirabrata Senapati, Engineering Manager
Amazon EC2
Amazon Web Services
Adam Kauffman, Director of Engineering
Engineering
Stord
Jennifer Shehane, Senior Engineering Manager
Cypress App Team
Cypress.io