Desmond Choy

Shipping full-stack AI systems end-to-end. Researching self-supervised learning and behavioral AI.

6 production apps shipped across education, music, computer vision, and behavioral science.

Published Work

Production applications and research across AI engineering, computer vision, and education technology.

Buttery Smooth Jamming

Built a real-time multi-agent orchestration runtime where four thread-resumed AI musicians improvise together while the server enforces deterministic routing, state continuity, and final pattern composition.

  • Architected a dual-mode Codex and Strudel runtime that powers both assistant interactions and live multi-agent jam sessions.
  • Implemented server-owned orchestration for four isolated Codex-backed agent sessions with deterministic @mention routing and structured composition safeguards.
  • Added real-time streaming, multimodal control, and validation gates to keep the system responsive, reliable, and safe under live conditions.
Next.jsTypeScriptCodexStrudelMCPWebSockets

Learning Odyssey

Deployed a stateful LLM application that turns deterministic story and lesson content into 10-chapter educational adventures, using validate-then-stream delivery, task-specific Gemini routing, and persistent session state to make non-deterministic generation reliable for real users.

  • Validate-then-stream delivery generates a full chapter, checks structural correctness with retries, and only then streams approved content to the user.
  • Deterministic story YAML and lesson CSV inputs are wrapped in task-specific Gemini routing, keeping content grounded without relying on embeddings or RAG.
  • Supabase-backed state, reconnect-safe WebSockets, deferred background tasks, and telemetry keep adventures resumable, responsive, and observable in a production-style stack.
FastAPISupabaseGemini 2.5Imagen 4RailwayReactWebSockets

NANA is a public BYOK study prototype that transforms dense PDFs into personalized study workspaces, combining adaptive notes, document overviews, and inline AI explanations around real study workflows.

  • Two-phase PDF pipeline with large-file preprocessing and splitting for cost-efficient note generation.
  • Personalized document overviews and study notes adapted to learner background and goals.
  • Inline AI commands, browser-resumable study state, and exportable Markdown notes built for real study workflows.
PythonFastAPITypeScriptReactViteGemini 3 Flash

Moodsic

End-to-end affective computing pipeline that turns noisy real-world video into music recommendations through dual-pathway ML, variance-weighted fusion, and full-stack delivery.

  • CLIP scene analysis + EmoNet facial cues fused through uncertainty-aware dual-pathway ML
    • Variance-weighted fusion with temporal smoothing improved VEATIC MAE by ~19% vs scene-only baselines
    • Delivered a React + Flask demo with synced playback, emotion visualizations, and DEAM music matching
PyTorchReactFlaskOpenCVCLIP ViT-B/32EmoNetMediaPipe

Twinkl

Values-alignment journal analyzing whether daily behavior reflects stated priorities across ten Schwartz dimensions.

  • VIF: ordinal MLP heads with MC Dropout uncertainty estimation
  • Synthetic data generation: 204 personas, 1,651 journal entries
  • Automated LLM judge labeling pipeline via Claude Code subagents
PyTorchShinyPolarsnomic-embed-textOpenAI APIThree.js

SSL ViT Models

Research prototype testing whether SSL, VLM, and supervised vision models attend to the architectural features experts consider diagnostic.

  • Compared DINOv2, DINOv3, MAE, CLIP, SigLIP, SigLIP2, and ResNet-50 across frozen and fine-tuned conditions.
  • Used IoU, Coverage, MSE, KL, EMD, bootstrap confidence intervals, Wilcoxon tests, and Holm correction for attention-alignment claims.
  • Built a FastAPI + React dashboard over precomputed attention, feature, metric, and heatmap artifacts.
PyTorchFastAPIReactVision Transformers

About

Finance to Data Science to AI Engineering

AI engineer and CFA Charterholder shipping full-stack AI systems end-to-end—from LLM orchestration and API design to real-time user-facing systems, production workflows, and serious prototypes.

Career arc runs from traditional finance (fixed income, portfolio management) through data science to AI engineering, with domain expertise in financial services, insurance, and reinsurance. Currently pursuing a Master of Technology in Artificial Intelligence Systems at the National University of Singapore while working as Manager, Data Science at Pacific Life Re.

Skills

AI & Machine Learning

LLM EvaluationLLM OrchestrationMulti-Agent SystemsRAGAgentic WorkflowsContext EngineeringCost OptimizationStructured Output ExtractionValidate-then-StreamSimulation TestingObservability & TelemetrySelf-Supervised LearningVision TransformersFine-tuning (LoRA)PyTorchNLP

Full-Stack Development

FastAPINext.jsReactTypeScriptWebSocketsPostgreSQLSupabaseTailwind CSSMCP ServersJWT Auth

Languages

PythonTypeScriptSQLR

Domain Expertise

Financial ServicesInsurance & ReinsuranceRegulatory CompliancePortfolio Analytics

Experience

2022–present

Manager, Data Science / Pacific Life Re

Built production AI systems and internal POCs for reinsurance workflows; presented ML/AI use cases for underwriting and claims at regional actuarial and client seminars

2021

Data Scientist / Circles.Life

Built churn, anomaly-detection, and customer-segmentation models across the full ML lifecycle

2017–2020

Data Scientist / Fixed Income Analyst / UOB Asset Management

Built NLP text-mining pipelines and research dashboards for investment idea generation

2015–2017

Fixed Income Analyst / Great Eastern Life

Credit research coverage across investment-grade corporate bonds and loans

2011–2014

Assistant Portfolio Manager / Woori Absolute Partners

Promoted to front-office; firm won 4 regional awards (2012–2014)

Education

2025–2026

Master of Technology in Artificial Intelligence Systems(Expected)

National University of Singapore

CEO's Honour List, AY2025/2026 Semester 1

2014

CFA Charterholder

CFA Institute

2009

BSc Management (First Class Honours)

University of London

Get in Touch

Singapore (UTC+08:00)