Upanshu's portrait

Hi, I am

Upanshu Parekh

SWE at MiRage, CS at UIUC

ABOUT ME

UIUC CS Logo

Hi! 👋 I’m Upanshu (oo-pahn-shoe), I’m a 4th year B.S. student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) studying Computer Science. I am most comfortable with:

  • Python (Pytorch, Numpy, and other Data Processing libraries)
  • Game Development Engines (Unreal Engine 5)
  • HTML / JavaScript / TypeScript (React.js, Next.js, D3.js)
  • CSS / Tailwind / LESS
  • Unix / Linux Machines
  • C / C++

I have experience with:

  • Containerization and Virtualization (Docker, QEMU, Virtual Machines)
  • SQL / Databases
  • Cloud Infrastructure (GCP / Oracle Cloud)
  • Java

My personal interests include 🏎 Formula 1, 🔭 astronomy, 👾 videogames, and 🏋🏽‍♂️ weightlifting. Feel free to bring these up in conversation if we have any shared interests!

EXPERIENCE

Mirage VR Labs Logo

MiRage VR Labs

I am currently a Software Engineer at the startup MiRage. MiRage VR Labs develops VR software that allows students to perform various science experiments in a virtual environment. It aims to provide an immersive and hands-on learning experience for students. Check out the LinkedIn page đź”—for the startup!

I primarily work with Unreal Engine 5 and C++ to develop these VR experiences. My responsibilities include designing and implementing VR interactions and mechanics, optimizing the performance, and debugging and troubleshooting issues in VR environments.

UIUC Logo

Course Assistant

I am also currently a Course Assistant for CS461 / ECE422 (Computer Security I) at UIUC. I help students with their Cybersecurity-related projects throughout the semester and hold office hours to answer any questions they may have. I really enjoy helping students understand the material and figuring out how to explain it in a way that makes sense to them. Doing this has also helped me understand the material better.

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CodeHS

Over the summer of 2024 I worked as a Software Engineer Intern at CodeHS, a company that develops educational Computer Science material for millions of students. I primarily used Python, Django, LESS, SQL, and Docker.

I worked on prototyping a search engine that performs fast similarity search on a word embedding database using Facebook AI Similarity Search 🔎as well as a realtime quiz leaderboard prototype for Questions of the Day (similar to Kahoot!) using Google Firebase.

EXTRA­CURRICULARS

A screenshot of MoTeC i2 telemetry software with the Illinois Electric Motorsports logo

Formula SAE

Illini Electric Motorsports is about developing a racecar from scratch every year to compete internationally against other universities’ formula-spec cars.

I was a member of the Data Acquisition and Quantitative Analysis team from January to April 2024, and saved the team more than $700 by developing an in-house Python file format converter for the MoTeC i2 telemetry software by augmenting snippets of an existing open-source library.

PORTFOLIO

Musaic Logo

Musaic was a visualization tool that aimed to help Spotify listeners input their listening history and tracked various characteristics of their music taste and how they changed throughout the years.

It was a final project for CS467 (Social Visualization) and I developed much of the frontend design using the D3.js visualization library (and React.js for interactivity).

Check out the project here 🎵and the GitHub code 🔗for it

Atari Breakout AI

In the CS444 Deep Learning for Computer Vision class, we learned all about about computer vision history, theory, and application, from classical gradient descent methods to present day innovations like transformers.

We also learned about Deep Reinforcement Learning and applied the Double DQN algorithm to create an AI that can play the classic arcade game Atari Breakout! We used Google Colab to be able to train the model on higher end GPUs for efficiency. Results are shown in the video.

CONTACT

Upanshu's professional picture

Thanks for checking out my website! I hope you enjoyed learning about me and my experiences.

Feel free to contact me at my Email 📧for any reason, whether it’s about any of my background listed above, professional inquiries, or just to say hi! I’m always open to meeting new people and learning new things, and I usually respond within 24-48 hours. My GitHub and LinkedIn are located in the footer below as well as at the top of the page.