Samuel Apoya — welcome

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About

I work with teams to develop full-stack applications, building backend systems with REST APIs and frontend interfaces. I'm passionate about building accessible AI systems. CS & Econ student at Colby, Research Assistant at Insite Lab, TA for ML and Software Engineering. I enjoy playing piano, and my favorite pice is Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky.

Skills

Frontend & Backend CI/CD Pipelines Machine Learning Flask, FastAPI, and Django PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MongoDB PyTorch & TensorFlow Next.js and Node.js Python Swift Java & C++ AWS, Google Cloud, & Azure

Portfolio

Collegia

Academic Advising Platform

Problem: Students & professors struggle with managing advising appointments.

Solution: Built this platform to connect students with advisors, automate email notifications, and simplify getting meeting notes to students

Impact: Reduced scheduling time, number of missed sessions, and made meetings easy to manage.

Flask PostgreSQL JavaScript Google OAuth REST APIs Enterprise-grade Backend Architecture

Curator Bot

AI-Powered Museum Accessibility

Problem: Blind and low-vision museum visitors lack detailed artwork descriptions to engage with visual art.

Solution: Together with my professor we developed a web application using fine-tuned LLaMA models to generate rich, contextual artwork descriptions for museums.

Impact: Presented at AI Symposium 2025, demonstrating improvement in description quality over standard models.

Next.js Linux UI/UX Design LLaMA Fine-tuning Computer Vision

Portfolio Risk Analyst

AI Financial Analysis Agent

Problem: Individual investors lack sophisticated portfolio risk analysis tools used by professional fund managers.

Solution: Created AI agent analyzing portfolios using ML models to assess risk levels and provide diversification recommendations.

Impact: Processes portfolio analysis in under 30 seconds, identifying hidden risk concentrations with 85% accuracy.

Python Next.js FastAPI Machine Learning Financial APIs Data Visualization

CloudHelpAI

Intelligent IT Support Chatbot

Problem: Colleges and IT support centers lack fine-tuned AI systems to handle common IT support queries, leading to high ticket volumes and slow response times.

Solution: Built NLP-powered chatbot using fine-tuned LlaMA to provide answers to common questions encountered at IT support centers at college settings

Impact: Allows for easy access to IT support, reducing ticket volume and improving response times for common issues.

JavaScript REST APIs HTML & CSS NLP AWS

Experience

Research Assistant

Insite Lab, Colby College, Present

Conducting research on multimodal AI systems for accessibility applications under Dr. Stacy Doore. Fine-tuning vision-language models to generate artwork descriptions for blind and low-vision museum visitors.

Teaching Assistant

Colby College, Present

Teaching Machine Learning and Software Engineering courses to undergraduate students. Providing guidance on course material, grading assignments, and supporting student learning.

Software Engineering & Research Intern

Davis Institute for AI, October 2024 - May 2025

Developed backend systems with Java, AWS, and NLP technologies. Researched on RAG systems to reduce, achieving significant reduction in hallucinations.

Research Intern

Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, Summer 2023

Analyzed environmental data for sustainable seaweed farming using Temporal Convolutional Networks. Processed and visualized large datasets to identify optimal growing conditions.

IT Support Intern

Colby College, 2022 - Present

Provides technical support to students and faculty. Troubleshoots hardware and software issues, manages IT tickets, and maintains computer software.

Highlights

🎓 AI Liberal Arts Symposium '25

Connecticut College

Presented research on accessible AI applications for museum visitors with visual impairments.

October 2024

HackPrinceton Fall '24

Best Hack in Healthcare

Built QCare, an AI-powered healthcare assistant that won the top healthcare prize among 500+ participants.

November 2024

Let's Work Together

I'm open to research collaborations, software engineering opportunities, and interesting projects. Whether you're looking to discuss AI accessibility, full-stack development, or potential positions, I'd love to hear from you.