Lenny Khazan

About

Born and raised in Long Island, NY. Now studying computer science, math & philosophy at Yale. I spend most of my time (outside of classwork/extracurriculars) doing full-stack mobile app development, although I am also interested in machine learning, bioinformatics, and neuroscience.

Email me if you want to talk; I’ll try to get back to you within a couple hours.

History

I got my start with iOS development in 2010, making a couple (long-defunct) games to get my feet wet.

At WWDC in 2013, I crossed paths with Rohan Kapur, and we started building a debate platform Contra. Many years and several iterations later, we found ourselves with a modest but devoted user base using the app. The app is still functional today and has raised funding, although as of 2018 I have chosen to step down to an advisory role to pursue other projects.

Along the way, I found my way to the field of machine learning, developing a love for math in the process. Rohan and I started A Year of AI in 2016 to document our learnings. A handful of machine learning projects are still available on my GitHub.

In 2017, I graduated high school and enrolled at Yale University. At Yale, I’ve been fortunate enough to meet some incredible people, and join the following groups:

  • Yale Daily News: I co-lead the web development team, where we are now in the process of planning a ground-up redesign of our website and internal tools to modernize our newsroom. I also wrote about dinosaurs that one time.
  • Restaurant Rescue Project: I served on the board of RRP my freshman year. We help to eliminate food waste around New Haven by bringing leftover food from restaurants around the area to shelters and soup kitchens.
  • Yale Undergraduate Aerospace Association: My freshman year, I worked on the tiltrotor team, where I was responsible for writing all of the Arduino code to control and fly our contraption.
  • YDriving: We program miniature self-driving cars using computer vision and machine learning techniques. Our exploratory work with these cars is now being offered as a course in the computer science department in Spring ‘19.
  • Computational Linguistics at Yale: I recently joined this lab, where I will help study our stack-augmented neural network model on linguistic tasks.

In the summer of 2018, I interned at Yale startup Snackpass (YC W18). As one of five engineers at the company, I was responsible for rebuilding their backend infrastructure in Node.js, and migrating away from Firebase. I continue to work with Snackpass on a part-time basis.

In the summer of 2019, I will be interning at Butterfly, helping to build the iOS app that powers their portable ultrasound machine.