~/laksh
laksh@rice: ~
~ $ cat name.txt

Laksh Sarda

~ $ cat intro.txt
CS + Data Science @ Rice UniversitySWE intern @ AxesTrack, Summer 2026Co-Founder @ CheckMate, Georgia Tech Create-X
~ $
try
Looking for SWE and ML internships, Summer 2027

I study Computer Science with a minor in Data Science at Rice University. This year I built an AI exam grader, a monitoring agent that runs on 400 laptops, and an Othello engine trained by self-play.

GitHub LinkedIn Email
~/about

About

Most of what I've built started with something taking too long: grading handwritten exams by hand, installing updates on 400 laptops one at a time, re-typing tables that a PDF copy mangled. I find the step that takes the most time and make that step faster first.

Quick Facts
SchoolRice University
MajorCS + Data Science
Off-screenRice Table Tennis
~/experience

Where I've worked

May – Jul 2026
  • Took over a laptop monitoring agent that had been crashing in production for three years. Traced the Windows crashes to memory exhaustion from oversized dependencies, then rewrote it in C++ with no third-party dependencies. The build got 93% smaller and shipped to 400 Windows and Ubuntu machines.
  • Built an over-the-air update pipeline where devices poll an nginx reverse proxy and verify a SHA-256 checksum before installing. Rollouts went from weeks of manual installs to 5 minutes.
  • Wrote a watchdog that restarts the agent seconds after a Task Manager kill and flushes a final telemetry log inside the OS shutdown grace period. Downtime incidents fell 60%.
  • Primary developer on an ERP system for sales procurement, used by 300+ employees, on a team of 5. The procurement cycle went from over a week to 2 to 3 days.
C++PythonFastAPIPostgreSQLReactnginx
Dec 2025 – Jul 2026
Georgia Tech Create-X
Georgia Tech's startup accelerator, Summer 2026 batch
  • Built an AI tool that grades handwritten exam PDFs in minutes with 95% average accuracy, replacing a workflow that took hours. Regrades re-run a single page, cutting inference 80%.
  • Designed a batching engine that packs questions to a token budget and fans out to 15 parallel Gemini workers with jittered backoff. 500+ submissions grade in under a minute.
  • Wrote a Chrome extension that pulls submissions from the grading platform, places annotations and applies rubric items.
  • Started the stack on Azure, then migrated OCR and grading to Google Document AI and Gemini on AWS ECS.
GeminiDocument AIAWSFastAPISupabaseJavaScript
Aug 2026 – Present

Undergraduate Teaching Assistant, COMP 181

Rice University, School of Engineering and Computing
  • Teach a weekly discrete math section of freshmen: propositional logic, sets, relations and induction.
  • Run weekly office hours and grade coursework for the class.
Mar 2026

Student Extern

Dell Technologies, remote
  • Analyzed supply chain attack vectors, BIOS-level vulnerabilities and post-quantum cryptographic risk, classified with MITRE ATT&CK.
  • Evaluated zero trust architecture patterns against NIST SP 800-207, covering continuous verification and least-privilege access.
MITRE ATT&CKNIST SP 800-207Threat modeling
~/projects

Projects

3 projects
featured Jun – Jul 2026

AlphaZero Othello

An Othello engine that taught itself from 700,000 games of self-play, with no human games or opening book. I moved move generation and tree search into C++ and batched GPU inference, which made self-play 10× faster. It beats my brother and me.

10×self-play throughput
700kself-play games
PythonC++PyTorchMCTSFastAPIDocker
a position from one of its games
report.pdfSales by regionRegionQ1Q2North412530South388402hotkeyGoogle Docsplain pasteSales by region RegionQ1 Q2 North 412 530South 388 402with CarbonSales by regionRegionQ1Q2North412530South388402
Jul – Aug 2026

Carbon

A macOS app that keeps bold text, tables and columns intact when you copy from a PDF into Docs, Word or Excel. It restores the original formatting 91% of the time across 7,000+ pages.

PythonPyMuPDFmacOS
Jan – May 2026

ML Library for Peg Solitaire

A solver that finds the fewest pegs any board can end with, run on 420,000 boards, treating rotations and mirrors as the same position to cut the work 8×. It runs on a companion library of 14 ML algorithms written from scratch in NumPy. Built for a graduate-level machine learning class.

PythonNumPy
BakerNorthSeibelSouthWestOwlUCanEatlunch, 5 hallsvegetarianopen nowPaneer tikkaNorthVeggie lasagnaSeibelBlack bean tacosWestMushroom risottoBaker
Jan – Feb 2026

OwlUCanEat

One page with all five Rice dining hall menus, searchable by dish, cuisine and allergen. Each hall's site has its own hand-written parser, and menus are cached per week so a page loads in under 200ms. Still live, with 100+ daily users.

PythonFastAPIJinja2Vercel
Aug 2024 – Jan 2025

Echo-Lingua

A hearing aid prototype that translates speech as you hear it, built on a Raspberry Pi with an ESP-32 driving the microphone and speaker. Speech-to-text, translation and text-to-speech run at the same time in a multi-threaded pipeline, which holds end-to-end latency under 2 seconds.

PythonPyTorchRaspberry PiESP-32
CS major + Data Science minor, max 3 a term✓ all requirements metFall 1Spring 1Fall 2Spring 2COMP 140COMP 215MATH 212COMP 182COMP 310COMP 222COMP 382STAT 310COMP 321MATH 355electiveCOMP 140COMP 182COMP 382COMP 215COMP 310COMP 222COMP 321prerequisite, taken first
Sep 2026

CourseDecider

A degree planner for Rice. Give it your majors, minors, completed courses and course load, and it returns the smallest set of courses that meets every requirement in prerequisite order. Requirements are scraped from the General Announcements and solved with OR-Tools CP-SAT.

PythonOR-ToolsFlaskBeautifulSoup
slides.pdf
quiz.pdf
+3
Insert
Sep 2026

Prompt Cacher

A Chrome extension that saves a claude.ai prompt with its attached files and puts both back with one click. claude.ai keeps no copy of an upload on the page, so it reads the unsent draft claude.ai stores in the browser and downloads each file back. Re-attaching five PDFs goes from about 90 seconds to 5.

JavaScriptChrome MV3IndexedDB
Oct 2025

Medicine Detector

Finds a named medicine box in a photo of a shelf. Azure OCR reads every box, then sentence-transformer embeddings and fuzzy matching pick the one you asked for and draw an arrow to it.

PythonAzure OCROpenCVPyTorchTransformers
Jun 2026

CountryTrack

A travel map my family shares: each of us marks the countries we have visited on a 3D globe and a flat map. Built in React with globe.gl and d3, with Vercel serverless functions and Blob storage keeping every device in sync.

JavaScriptReactglobe.gld3Vercel
Sep – Oct 2025

JunkCloud

Your laptop is full and the one next to you has 200GB doing nothing. JunkCloud lets a group of laptops pool their disk, so your overflow is stored on your friends' machines and theirs is stored on yours. Files are split into chunks, encrypted on your machine before they leave, and every chunk is stored on two peers.

PythonFastAPISQLitesockets
~/education

Education

Rice University

B.S. Computer Science, Minor in Data Science
Houston, TX
GPA3.96 / 4.00
HonorsPresident's Honor Roll, Fall 2025
ScholarshipTrustee Distinguished Merit
TeamRice Table Tennis
Coursework
Data Structures & AlgorithmsMachine Learning (Graduate-Level)Computer Organization (C)Program Design (Java)Linear AlgebraProbability & Statistics

Jayshree Periwal International School

IB Diploma45 / 45
Class RankValedictorian
ActivitiesDeputy Head Boy
Table Tennis Team Captain
Quiz Club President
~/hobbies

Hobbies

Table tennis

I played table tennis at the national level in India, and now I play on the Rice Table Tennis Team.

Press and hold on the table to take the red bat, and swipe sideways as you hit to aim. Let go to hand it back.

Chess

Every summer, when the family got together, I played chess with my father and my cousins. The board above plays the Sicilian Najdorf, my favourite opening.