Sumner Hull

Roseville High School

Senior Year, Class of 2025

Field of Interest: Robotics, Programming, Electrical Engineering

Team: Member of Team 8774 Robotics

Hobbies: Building electric and acoustic guitars, working on 3D printers, fishing

Avikon

Software Engineer

• Designed a Qt‑based chat application utilizing TCP for real‑time communication within a client‑server architecture, demonstrating expertise in socket programming, data serialization, and message routing.
• Crafted message types in IDL and designed a data‑centric publish‑subscribe architecture based on a flyweight design pattern to implement OpenDDS for a radar system’s command and control interface. Utilized QoS policies to facilitate the transmission of both volatile and persistent data across different topics.
• Implemented a fully asynchronous AMQP‑based C++ client with a layered architecture for RabbitMQ message broker to ensure seamless message handling among multiple topics.
• Developed a cross‑platform asynchronous program to refine UAV detection for a GIS application. Benchmarked point‑in‑polygon algorithms with a GeoJSON polygon database concurrently fetched from MongoDB.

SemperTech

Software Engineer

• Worked on the “Arçelik Digital Home Energy” project in a collaborative effort with DAI‑Labor at the Technical University of Berlin under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Şahin Albayrak.
• Simulated discovery, pairing, and data exchange processes using the EEBUS protocol suite with C# and Go. Migrated the framework from Go to C++ in order to ensure future adaptability for smart home IoT devices.
• Implemented the TLS protocol for secure data exchange using the X.509 standard and integrated multicast DNS for seamless communication to complement the development of SHIP and SPINE protocols.

Scale AI

Prompt Engineer

• Crafted elaborate Turkish prompts for various generative AI tasks. Tailored prompts using well‑defined formats such as natural language questions and structured inputs based on the task’s domain to fine‑tune the LLM, improving the chatbot’s responses and enhancing overall performance.
• Provided user feedback by reviewing and scoring the chatbot’s responses to ensure they align with intended chatbot behaviors and the chatbot produces accurate and contextually appropriate responses to given prompts.
• Engaged in collaborative meetings with cross‑functional teams and project coordinators, actively seeking guidance, addressing queries, and collectively brainstorming strategies to generate higher‑quality prompts.

Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems

Undergraduate Researcher

• Engaged in collaborative research within the Robotics, Collectives and Learning subgroup at the Physical Intelligence Department with Ph.D. students Sinan Özgün Demir and Alp Can Karacakol on a project about 3D printing and heat‑assisted magnetic programming of soft machines under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Metin Sitti.
• Optimized a C++ ROS package for real‑time conversion of 3D motion controller events to ROS messages, achieving high‑frequency and buffer‑free synchronization.
• Developed an Arduino Mega driver to activate a laser and pressure regulator, for monitoring coil temperatures and PID tuning to control the coil currents. Established a robust ROS‑Arduino communication network by integrating ROSSerial and handshaking to simulate a 3D printing and magnetic programming process with Python.
• Designed the project’s system and software architecture, flowchart, and state machine diagram. Expanded G‑code capabilities by incorporating spherical coordinates to specify the direction of magnetization for shape morphing.

Nanonetworking Research Group, Boğaziçi University

Undergraduate Researcher

• Worked on the “Design and Implementation of Molecular Communication Systems Using Index Modulation” project under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Ali Emre Pusane.
• Simulated the Brownian motion of molecules in a SISO MCvD system and predicted simulation parameters such as receiver radius, diffusion coefficient, and transmitter‑receiver distance using CNNs with Keras and TensorFlow.
• Plotted the arrival of molecules per symbol duration in a SISO MCvD system using Binomial, Poisson, and Gaussian model approximations with MATLAB.
• Ran Monte Carlo simulations of the Gaussian model to encode and decode randomized binary sequences in a SISO MCvD system using BCSK modulation technique and calculated the bit error rate on Z‑channel.

SESTEK Speech Enabled Software Technologies

AI Research and Development Intern

• Executed diverse NLP tasks, including NER, POS tagging, sentiment analysis, text classification, and extractive and generative QA using transformers and Hugging Face libraries. Conducted a thorough literature review on information retrieval and reading comprehension to stay updated on SOTA ML models.
• Developed a generative QA system with dense passage retrieval (DPR) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques using the Haystack framework and PyTorch.
• Worked on a Turkish open‑domain QA system made by fine‑tuning BERTurk and XLM‑Roberta models. Tabularized exact match and F1 scores derived from DeepMind’s XQuAD and various Turkish data sets.

Meteksan Defense Industry Inc.

Analog Design Engineering Intern

• Designed and simulated numerous analog circuits such as voltage‑mode controlled buck converter, phase‑shifted full‑bridge isolated DC‑DC converter, and EMI filters with LTspice. Integrated these circuits and implemented a 320 W power distribution unit to be used in a radar system’s power circuit board.
• Researched real‑world compatible electronic components to be used in such circuits including GaNFETs, high‑side gate drivers, and Schottky diodes.
• Assembled PCBs of both common and differential mode filters and used VNA Bode 100 to measure the cut‑off frequencies.

An ongoing project in which I am involved focuses on the efficient management of multiple 3D printers.

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