Umar Patel

• Led development with team of 6 researchers and policy experts at HAI’s Digital Economy Lab to develop scalable public deliberation web platform for US policymakers and community leaders. • Integrated LLM-driven chat and summarization features alongside real-time data visualizations to enhance policy-facing decision-making processes and citizen engagement. • Orchestrated deliberation sessions for 800+ policy experts and participants, achieving 15% reduced polarization across topics. • Engineered dynamic user-centered voting dashboard to enable broad policy discourse and deliver actionable stakeholder insights.

• Led team of 8 policy researchers to develop a 3-pillar framework to mitigate AI deepfake risks, working directly with the CIO and Director of Technology of Fort Collins to create a strategy spanning public awareness campaigns, integrated technology solutions, and policy measures.

• Advised and oversaw 25+ digital technology and humanities projects, focusing on multidisciplinary AI solutions and 3D applications. • Developed and presented 6 strategic frameworks for developer-centered approaches on 3D technology to over 40 industry leaders, educators, and researchers.

• Optimized machine learning models for Arabic and Ottoman handwritten text recognition, processing over 12,000 handwritten samples from over 15 Ottoman Turkish datasets, improving character and word recognition accuracy by 54%. • Developed machine learning tools for Ottoman Turkish alongside team of international linguists from Turkey and Germany to enable translation, information retrieval, and multi-text sequence alignment, improving accessibility for non-western languages. • Digitized 2,600+ previously inaccessible manuscripts into a searchable database for historians and geographers. • Presented at major conferences such as the Global Digital Humanities Symposium and Association for Computers and Humanities.

• Developed Ottoman Turkish NLP tools for tasks such as machine translation, lemmatization, multi-text sequence alignment, topic modeling, information retrieval, and question-answering. • Leveraged LLMs for specialized Ottoman Turkish language tasks, including sentence-level textual alignment, script specific linguistic patterns, and translation assistance.

• Spearheaded development of immersive, geospatial historical map exploration app for virtual reality on the Apple Vision Pro, reducing map content lookup speeds by 75% and providing access to over 6,000 georeferenced digital maps. • Collaborated with team of 5 historians and geographers to engineer 2D and 3D content for 30+ points of interest in 20 city regions. • Adapted new visionOS development framework and conducted extensive user-testing to create seamless, user-centered visualizations serving over 1000 students and historians.

• Provided personalized advising and travel consulting to over 400+ study abroad students, assisting with trip planning, cultural adjustments, and academic experiences in Oxford. • Led over 20+ community-building events and created comprehensive resource materials, including maps, cultural guides, travel itineraries, and travel presentations for easy navigation and exploration. • Developed an iOS app for local exploration, helping students access key sites and cultural information around Oxford. Verified passport and travel information for seamless travel preparation.

• Led development of 10 new Virtual Reality frameworks transforming existing one-dimensional systems into dynamic and efficient user-centered applications for furniture, food, and notetaking industries, reducing user action-to-output times to below 2 seconds. • Managed cross-team functionalities, coordinating front-end user interface design with back-end processing. • Delivered weekly presentations to 30+ industry researchers and collaborated with HCI teams working in AI, education, and health.

• Developed image segmentation model using Detectron2 to analyze 500+ Chinese ceramic cross-sections for material composition. • Implemented computer vision techniques including edge detection, object detection, and instance segmentation for extraction if key regions of interest.

• Directed team of 5 international architects and designers to develop a virtual 3D meditation space and cultural learning hub using Unity 3D, enhancing user engagement through immersive audio-visual interfaces. • Led development of key features including interactive digital user interfaces, educational walkthroughs, map-drawing exercises, and meditative audio experiences in collaboration with designers and architects.

• Developed first-person VR worlds for the Oculus Quest headset, interactive experiments, and performed 3D modeling for research at Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab. • Data extraction and audio tagging for experiment analysis.

Masters degree in Computer Science (MS, Visual Computing Concentration)

- Research in Medieval Anglo-Saxon and Norman Archaeology. - Coursework in Artificial Intelligence in European Society. - Bransenose College Men's Boat Club.

Dual Degrees in Computer Science (BS, Artificial Intelligence Concentration) and Archaeology (BA)