Biography

Embodied AI developer from rural New Hampshire currently living in Houston Texas living out my dream of building robots. Went from graduating high school with 30 students to graduating college with >10k students from Purdue University.

Interests: Embodied AI, UFC/MMA, 3D Model Generators, American Football, Autonomous Vehicles, Golf, & Video Games.

Previously:

  • ML Lead @ Purdue AIMM Lab creating an autonomous boat
  • Data & AI @ BDO Digital building ML & data driven solutions for clients,
  • Project Lead @ Maching Learning Purdue.

Contact Me: At any of the buttons on the left side of the page (Github, Email, LinkedIn, Youtube, Twitter)

Post-Grad Robotics Intern @ Persona AI

Houston, TX | May 25 - Aug 25

Grateful to join an early stage (pre-seed ~30 people) startup working on building humanoid robots for heavy industries. So far my focus has been on integrating hardware through SDKs into the teleoperation & manipulation stack along with hardware abstraction to speed up development timelines for ML infrastructure. I plan on working on locomotion via RL and whole-body teleoperation. Please reach me at nicholas@wade.dev if you are interested in joining or just want to talk about robotics!

B.S Computer Science @ Purdue University

West Lafayette, IN | Aug 21 - May 25

Data & AI Intern @ BDO Digital

Remote | Jun 23 - Dec 24 Worked full time 2 summers and part-time 3 semester at BDO Digital helping clients integrate artificial intelligence into their business. Project Categories Include:

  • Computer Vision
  • Large Language Models
  • RAG Chatbots
  • Manufacturing Automation
  • Data warehousing & integration
  • Various AI/ML demos in all areas for clients and internal projects

Provided me with a great introduction to software engineering as a profession and worked with a great group of people!

Projects

Coursework

Friends

After a year-end trip with a bunch of my closest friends from Purdue, we all decided to link to each others sites to put our network out on the web. These are updated as our careers advance and our lives change.

  • Jacob Zietek: Founding Engineer @ PersonaAI Inc., Embodied AI, Human-Robot Interaction, Machine Learning, and the person I have to thank for my interest in ML & introducing me to this network of now close friends
  • Cole Roberts: Embedded Dev @ Garmin, OS/Embedded Dev, Stoic master, Fitness/Health Hobbyist
  • Jinen Setpal: PhD @ Purdue University, ML/AI Interpretability Researcher, Everyones Hypeman, Productivity Master
  • Sagar Patil: Incoming Software Engineer @ SpaceX, Rockets, AI, Human Knowledge-Base
  • Mikail Khan: PhD @ CMU, Programming Languages Researcher, So smart I don’t know half the words he says
  • Aref Malek: Software Engineer @ SpaceX, Organizer of all the group activites (ty)
  • Harmya Bhatt: Software Engineer, cooked me in poker once, also TA’d my CS381 class
  • Bhavesh Pareek: Software Engineer @ Verkuda, Web Dev, Somehow always knows the answer to your questions
  • Saad Sharief: Software Engineer @ Tesla, Robotics, Compilers, ML Hardware, Never know what state or country he could be in at any given time, has a chill cat
  • Alexiy Buynitsky: Robotics Researcher, Always Working, Machine Learning, did I mention he never stops working?
  • Arnav Mehra: Incoming SWE @ Capital One, Web Dev, Programming Languages, absolute chiller

All links work as of January 2025