ALAN TAI / NO. 01

A PERSONAL ISSUENO. 01 / 2026

ALANTAI

Northwestern student building software and applied AI tools, with experience in product development and research.

Cupertino, CA / Evanston, IL

a letter

I like systems with people still visible inside them.

Hi, I'm Alan. I learned to make things in a student newsroom, long before I thought of software as the medium.

Reporting taught me to ask one more question before writing. Debate taught me to find the weakest assumption before someone else did. Those habits still shape how I approach software, research, and early-stage teams.

At Northwestern, I study Industrial Engineering and Artificial Intelligence. I build software and AI automations at WingRep, develop evaluation workflows at Meritus Labs, and research computational pathology through FORGE at Northwestern Medicine.

alan

Portrait of Alan Tai in a navy suit and purple tie outdoors.
The official version.

I just want to make things that work.

Ask firstbuild second

  1. i start with the people closest to the problem, then turn what repeats into something testable.

  2. i move between research, product, and implementation instead of treating the handoffs as somebody else's job.

  3. i want the result legible enough for another person to question it.

  4. i use the workflow in the real world before calling it finished.

Away from the screen

  • 01GEOCACHES
  • 02FIRE HYDRANTS
  • 03ROADSIDE LANDMARKS
  • 04MANDARINFluent speaking; working written proficiency.

07

project files

  1. Peel
  2. TurfIQ
  3. GreenChain
  4. Architec
  5. Arrival
  6. TerraBlade
  7. Vox Vera

07 files / select to read

  1. A HackMIT-winning prototype combining a phone-connected pill tester with an AI evidence engine.

  2. A field-operations app used by three Evanston-area golf courses to record soil moisture and plan maintenance.

  3. A supply-chain sustainability prototype that researches suppliers, estimates emissions, and maps their relationships.

  4. An energy-audit prototype that turns commercial-building utility bills into ranked upgrades, projected savings, and payback estimates.

  5. A prototype that turns foreign rent history, bank statements, and domestic cash flow into a portable credit profile for immigrants.

  6. An accessible clay slab-forming device built with Envision Unlimited that halved forming time for artists with physical disabilities.

  7. A Lambda Strategy client project recommending acquisition channels and audience segments for Vox Vera.

Peel artwork with a white capsule, connected evidence cards, and a translucent red strip.

Peel

AI evidence retrieval · 2026

A HackMIT-winning prototype combining a phone-connected pill tester with an AI evidence engine.

I built the evidence engine using FastAPI and Elasticsearch to search regulatory and drug records and produce cited reports. Teammates built the hardware, mobile experience, and chemistry analysis.

  • Python
  • FastAPI
  • Elasticsearch
  • Firecrawl
  • Three.js

HackMIT 2026: 1st Place Grand Prize and Elastic's Find the Signal sponsor award.

Team repository ↗

TurfIQ

Field operations · 2026

A field-operations app used by three Evanston-area golf courses to record soil moisture and plan maintenance.

As lead developer, I turned greenkeepers' field workflows into image-based soil-meter capture, shared readings, and weather-based forecasts that help crews plan their rounds.

  • React
  • TypeScript
  • Supabase
  • OpenAI Vision
  • Mapbox
Live app ↗Team repository ↗
TurfIQ artwork with layered topographic terrain, a soil sensor, and a red maintenance route.

notes 01-13 live in the margins

RESUME

Education

Northwestern UniversityIndustrial Engineering and Artificial IntelligenceEvanston, IllinoisUndergraduate studiesGPA 3.98 / 4.00

Now

  • From the call sheetweekly demos turn sales feedback into the next sprint's work.WingRep, GTM Engineering InternBuilding AI automations and Salesforce integrations for a revenue-intelligence startup. Shipped customer-facing Salesforce workflows and automated account research.
  • Margin statusdiscovery led to pilots; the work now includes evaluation and integration.Meritus Labs, Co-FounderDeveloping AI evaluation workflows with pilot teams, informed by customer discovery. Built integrations that connect evaluation workflows to client tools.

Research

  • At slide scalethe model combines thousands of image tiles into a slide-level prediction.Northwestern Medicine / NNCI, Data Science Researcher, FORGE Research CohortDeveloping models to predict colorectal-cancer molecular markers from tissue images. Reviews model attention heat maps with pathologists.
  • First papermy first paper started with drone photos of winter crops.University of California, Merced, Undergraduate Researcher, Computer VisionResearched crop nutrient detection from drone imagery with Ross Greer. Published computer-vision research at CONF-CDS 2024.
  • A different clockthe research explored learning in networks that communicate through spikes.University of California, Santa Barbara, Undergraduate Researcher, Spiking Neural NetworksStudied spiking neural networks and neuromorphic learning systems. Investigated backpropagation in spiking neural networks.

Recognition

  1. National Journalist of the YearJournalism Education Association · 2025
  2. Public Forum National ChampionNational Speech & Debate Association · 2025
  3. Six-time hackathon winnerCollegiate hackathons · 2026HackMIT 2026: 1st Place Grand Prize with Peel.

Professional experience

  • Ember Studios, Founding InternBuilt voice-agent infrastructure for personal memory preservation. Worked on backend systems, observability, and voice reliability.A note from the buildthe work is nda'd. the question of what makes a machine conversation worth keeping is not.
  • TAMID Group, ConsultantDeveloped product and go-to-market recommendations for Button AI, an AI paralegal startup. Translated competitor research into a pricing and fundraising deck.Deck rulethe client used our research to rethink its market narrative.
  • Teach for Chicago Journalism, Northwestern Medill, Administrative AideBuilt operations and audience tools for a journalism program serving 1,000+ students. Improved Mailchimp segmentation and built a React audience dashboard.Behind the bylinethe work connected program records, communications, and scheduling.
  • Thomson Reuters CS+Law Innovation Lab, Research FellowBuilt pipelines to evaluate language models on structured legal tasks. Combined embeddings, clustering, and rubric-based evaluation with human review.Evaluation footnotestructured outputs and shared rubrics made model comparisons inspectable.
  • Lambda Strategy, Consultant, Vox Vera client projectAnalyzed LinkedIn and SEO data to recommend acquisition channels for Vox Vera. Developed recommendations for legal, corporate, and academic audiences.What survivedthe client strategy drew on more than 1,000 marketing data points.

Leadership

  • iTalented, Founder and PresidentFounded a 50-member computer science community and coached student projects. Members went on to win eight ACSL national awards.The good scoreboardweekly problem sets and project critiques keep the coaching concrete.
  • El Estoque Newsmagazine, Editor-in-ChiefLed reporting, editing, and production for a 65-member student newsroom. Required factual claims to trace to named primary sources.Production-night inventoryproduction nights were indesign crashes, missing photo credits, and half-eaten bags of chips.
  • Monta Vista Debate, PresidentLed team operations and coached Public Forum debate while competing. Won the 2025 NSDA Public Forum national title.Crossfire lessongood prep had to be rigorous enough to win and clear enough to teach.

My posts, alongside books, films, and saved work by others.

Site notes

Why this site opens like a book

A small note about the structure of the thing you are reading.

read site note

Site notes

In defense of the side note

A small argument for keeping the useful detail close to the fact it complicates.

read site note

Read slowly enough to disagree.

Get in touch about internships, research, or a project.

Colophon

Set in
Zodiak and Tanker by the Indian Type Foundry (Fontshare); Newsreader by Production Type; Apfel Grotezk by Collletttivo; Server Mono by Internet Development Studio Co.
Paper
White #FFFFFF. Ink #0E0E0C. One red: #D7261E.
Press
React 19, Vite, three.js; a homemade WebGL page-flip; no template.
Proofs
g / printer’s proof · ? / the keys
Issue
No. 01. Originally published August 2026. Cupertino, CA / Evanston, IL.

NO. 01 / 2026