hi, i'm akbar. i'm an electrical engineering senior at mizzou, originally from uzbekistan. i build things across hardware and software, from data gloves for robotics at digitus labs to ai tools that make everyday work less repetitive.
i started the summer designing substations at gft in st. louis. when an opportunity came up to build glove hardware at a deep-tech startup in mountain view, silicon valley, i quit my internship and headed west. i'm interested in both the machines ai can control and the electricity that keeps them running. getting to play with very high voltage equipment was pretty fun.
outside of class and work, i build a lot. it started when i got tired of grinding internship applications, spending hours every day, so i built an agent that applies to jobs and does cold outreach for me. twelve days later it landed me the gft internship, and that agent became hiroo, the startup i was building.
beyond hiroo, i experiment with ai a lot, pushing it to its limits and making tons of fun side projects, following paul graham's advice to live in the future and build what seems interesting.
i also read a lot of great writing and share the best of it on my substack. like they say, you learn the most from the greats.
i built an ai version of myself on top of my second brain. it knows what i'm building, how i work, and most of what i've written. ask it anything, or use it to get a feel for how i think. chat with akbargpt →
with Tatem Poelma, Josephine Glaser, and AJ Baalmann.
now spinning →
hiroo →
unicraft →
second brain
building data gloves for robotics, from embedded firmware and signal acquisition to mixed-signal debugging and prototype bring-up. started in mountain view, silicon valley, and still working on it.
working with professor kristofferson culmer and grace, mizzou's unitree g1 humanoid. i've gotten her walking from code and mapped the lab using her built-in lidar. next, i'm working toward robot perception, object detection, and navigation. supported by the fall 2026 undergraduate research fellowship.
helped design the substations that power homes, factories, and data centers. worked on protection and control drawings, test-switch material lists, and rtu/scada reviews for utility upgrades.
built rgb and depth camera pipelines for livestock monitoring. reached 98.42% accuracy on a held-out sow posture benchmark and processed 75,120 frames across 3,766 timestamp folders.
previously vice president, aug 2025 to may 2026.
organizing cultural events and partnerships that bring uzbek students together and share our culture across campus.
in professor yi shang's lab, i worked on arc-agi-2, llm systems, and reasoning prototypes exploring compositional generalization with foundation models.
a couple from the wall. pictures and reminders i keep coming back to.
