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Hi, I am Davin

Davin Lawrence

Master's Student at University of Texas at Austin

In my past career, I worked in a every position imaginable in the Austin Music Industry. From professional DJ to Sales Manager, Audio Engineer to Session Guitarist, I had done it all. In 2016, I leveraged a lifetime passion for Linux and open-source software to a system administration role at a NLP startup. I finally saw the computer talk back and decided I needed to know everything about what makes that possible.

Five years later, I am now a Master’s student studying Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at the University of Texas at Austin. I am still very interested in NLP, but my horizons have expanded to Computer Vision and Neural Audio Synthesis. In my spare time, I still play guitar, make bad electronic music, and build little devices to delight my curiosity.

I am currently working on a program synthesis approach to generate Faust code to produce audio synthesizer architectures. A synthesizer-synthesizer, if you will.

Experiences

1
Digital Infrastructure Lead
Texas Inventionworks

Jun 2021 - Present, UT Austin

Texas Inventionworks is the Makerspace for the Cockrell School of Engineering at UT Austin offering hands on fabrication experience for students

Responsibilities:
  • Lead developer of Web App to manage Cockrell School of Engineering’s maker space
  • Project Management of Portal with team of student developers.
  • Complete design and deployment of AWS Amplify Stack using React and Material UI.
  • Manage securing and deployment of AWS resources to support other student teams within the maker space.

QA Intern
Silicon Labs.

May 2022 - Oct 2022, Austin, TX

Silicon Labs is fabless global technology that designs and manufactures semiconductors and other silicon devices.

Responsibilities:
  • Partial emulation of embedded devices with Memory forward under Avatar2 and QEMU in support of faster hardware interface fuzzing.
  • Performance testing and measurement of embedded devices under various cryptographic workloads.
2

3
IT/Developer
Smartish

Jun 2020 - December 2020, Austin, TX

Smartish is a mid-scale, local smartphone case manufacturer.

Responsibilities:
  • Handled day to day IT workload of small tech company. Managed data acquisition and display directly to company CEO.
  • Created blend of selenium web-scraping, API Development, and VBA scripts to automate and centralize sales reporting
  • Designed Postgres database using SQLAlchemy Python library to centralize company sales data on cloud based storage to move reporting away from Excel

CIS/CS Tutor
Austin Community College

Mar 2019 - May 2020, Austin, TX

Responsibilities:
  • Assist students in instruction in Python, C/C++, Java, SQL/Databases, and other topics as needed.
  • Manage computer lab, ensuring proper operation and use of school computers.
4

5
DevOps/Co-Founder
SecondBrain

Dec 2016 - May 2018, Austin, TX

SecondBrain was an NLP startup specializing in short-form creative text generation. Techstars Music Alumni 2018

Responsibilities:
  • Handled developer operations and cloud deployment of all company resources for small NLP-focused startup
  • Technical Lead for design, developing, and maintaining backend systems for deep learning NLP stack.
  • Deployed and maintained private Gitlab server for company use. Responsible for enforcing git practices.
  • SCRUM master for coordination between backend and frontend developers.

Education

BS/MS in Computer Science
Current GPA: 3.75 out of 4
Taken Courses
Course Name Total Credit Obtained Credit
Neural Networks 4 4
Robot Learning 4 4
Principles of ML 4 3.67
Compilers 4 4
Principles of Operating Systems 4 4
Advanced Operating Systems 4 4
Comp Organization and Architecture 4 4
Algorithms and Complexity 4 3.33
Quantum computing 4 4
Extracurricular Activities
  • Member of the Computer Science Transfer Society, assisting new students through the external transfer process
  • Active Maker at Texas Inventionworks building multiple projects including DIY Synthesizers, digital telephones, and more
Associates of Science in Computer Science
GPA: 3.84 out of 4
Associates of Science in Audio Engineering

Projects

Synthesizer Synthesizer
Synthesizer Synthesizer
Sole Contributor March 2023 - Present

Using LLM to synthesis Faust code to build digital synthesizers. Based loosely on AlphaCode, a LLM produces novel Faust code to build new audio synthesizer architectures.

Efficient Dataloading for Visiomotor Control
Efficient Dataloading for Visiomotor Control
Lead Contributor Sep 2022 - Dec 2022

Final Project for Robot Learning graduate course. Comparison of different torch data strategies resulting in 33% more efficient data loading for large multi-modal datasets.

Celestial Object Classification
Celestial Object Classification
Sole Contributor Nov 2022 - Dec 2022

Final project for undergraduate ML intro course. Used machine learning to dig into the Gaia Data Release version 3 to identify celestial objects.

Good Project, Sir
Good Project, Sir
Sole Contributor Mar 2022 - May 2022

Using few-shot learning and Pattern-Exploitative Training to identify spam and sentiment at the heart of the 2022 crypto boom and bust.

Quantum Computing Simulator
Quantum Computing Simulator
Sole Contributor Apr 2022 - May 2022

Using python and numpy to simulate gates for quantum computing calculations.

Texas Inventionworks Portal
Texas Inventionworks Portal
Lead Developer Jun 2021 - Present

Web Portal application for Texas Inventionworks, the makerspace located in the heart of the Engineering Education Research building at UT Austin.

libdigitone
libdigitone
Sole Developer Aug 2019 - Oct 2019

Python library for parsing SysEx information from the Elektron Digitone. No longer maintained to parse newer firmware.