Hey, it's Henry
About Me
I graduated summa cum laude from the University of Alberta and I'm currently a CS grad student at UT Dallas. I'm also a founding ML engineer at eXRealityAI, where I'm building agentic voice systems and multimodal XR applications.
I got into math early through competitions and olympiad prep. The contest tricks were fun, but what really stuck was learning how to take a messy problem and find the right angle to crack it. That eventually led me to research at Amii, where I worked on online algorithms and multi-armed bandits, making algorithms robust to worst-case inputs while still taking advantage of good predictions, and studying the exploration-exploitation tradeoffs that come up in bandit problems.
Over time I got more drawn to the gap between theory and practice, building things that actually work on real hardware, which is what brought me to where I am now.
I write occasionally at henryvu.blog.
Where I've Worked
AR/ML Developer @eXRealityAI
Aug 2025
- Built voice-to-voice RAG system (Whisper STT → hybrid retrieval with BM25 + FAISS → Mistral-7B-q4 → Kokoro TTS) achieving sub-10s latency with local inference on NVIDIA Jetson Orin AGX.
- Engineered NLP pipeline with EmbeddingGemma-300m, BAAI cross-encoder reranking, query rewriting, and intent-aware retrieval reducing processing by 40-70%.
- Integrated Gemini 2.5 with structured JSON schema and context-aware prompt engineering, orchestrating stateful multimodal workflows combining YOLOv9 and Wit.ai voice input across 2 XR applications.
- Mentored development teams on LLM API integration and prompt engineering for Meta Quest applications.
Computer Vision Engineer @ThorMed Innovation
Feb 2025 - Present
- Led domain-aligned transfer learning for NIH-funded bladder segmentation project. Pretrained U-Net and SimSiam SSL encoders on 9.2K thyroid/breast ultrasound images, achieving 95.99% Dice on downstream task.
- Enabled edge deployment via 4-bit PTQ with 7x robustness improvement over ImageNet initialization.
- Built automated data pipeline with PyTorch and OpenCV: extracted, preprocessed, and segmented 486 clinical images from ultrasound videos with augmentation and quality validation frameworks.
Teaching Assistant @UTDallas
Jan 2025 - Present
- Held weekly office hours, prepared seminar and exam materials, and graded coursework.
- Mentored 100+ students in Algorithms and Data Structures through technical reviews.
Undergraduate Research Assistant @SODALab
Dec 2023 - May 2024
- Reinforcement Learning: Conducted an in-depth theoretical and empirical survey about multi-armed bandit problems under settings such as stochastic, adversarial, Markovian, and restless bandits.
- Designed and implemented Python simulations to empirically validate and compare the performance of classic bandit algorithms, including UCB, Exp3, Thompson Sampling, and Gittins Index.
- Supervised by Dr. Xiaoqi Tan.
Teaching Assistant @UAlberta
Sep 2023 - May 2024
- Held weekly office hours, prepared seminar and exam materials, and graded coursework.
- Mentored 300+ students in Algorithms and Data Structures through technical reviews and weekly problem-solving sessions.
Undergraduate Researcher - Online Learning @Amii
Apr 2022 - May 2023
- Online Learning: Researched and implemented algorithms for online optimization problems such as online conversion, knapsack, and bipartite matching using the online primal-dual framework.
- Studied a new online learning framework that incorporates machine-learned predictions to develop both robust and consistent algorithms, extending beyond traditional worst-case analysis.
Projects I've Worked On
Agentic Framework for Suspect Detection
Multi-agent pipeline using LangGraph and Gemini for automated suspect identification from surveillance data.
BTS Concert Ticket Buying Simulator
Interactive web simulator recreating the BTS concert ticket buying experience with real-time queue mechanics.
Valentine Surprise
A fun interactive Valentine's Day web experience with animations and surprises.
Ultrasound Bladder Segmentation
NIH-funded project: pretrained U-Net encoders on 9.2K ultrasound images, achieving 7x robustness improvement in 4-bit quantization for edge deployment.
Modeling Political Sarcasm
Detection models using feature engineering and fine-tuned DistilRoBERTa to identify subtle political sarcasm in online text.
TFT Rolling Odds Calculator
Probability calculator using Markov Chains to compute champion finding odds based on level, pool size, and gold.
Polyps & Breast Ultrasound Segmentation
Attention U-Net for medical image segmentation on polyps and breast ultrasound datasets.
A Survey of Geometric Set Cover
Survey of approximation algorithms and PTAS approaches for the geometric set cover problem.
This Web Portfolio
Personal portfolio with theme switching, smooth animations, and responsive design.
UManitoba Navigator
Hackathon project: campus navigation app with Python FastAPI backend and React frontend.
ViT and Contrastive Representation Learning
Vision Transformer with contrastive representation learning for image classification.
VAE and Diffusion for FashionMNIST
Variational autoencoders and diffusion models for generating FashionMNIST images.
Yahoo's News Recommendation with MABs
Multi-armed bandit algorithms applied to Yahoo's news article recommendation dataset.
EEG Decoding: a Multi-Modal Approach
Novel EEG feature extraction combining convolution and self-attention, fused with LLM embeddings for brain signal classification.
Gomoku Solver
AI game engine using alpha-beta pruning and minimax search for Gomoku.
Online Algorithms: Seminar Slides
Research seminar slides on online algorithms and online convex optimization.
HabiTrak
Android habit tracking app with Firebase backend and Google Maps integration.
Toronto Neighbourhoods Data Analysis
Spatial clustering analysis of Toronto neighbourhoods using Foursquare API and web scraping.
Sudoku Solver
Arduino-based Sudoku solver using backtracking algorithms on embedded hardware.
Edmonton Restaurant Finder
Arduino pathfinding system for optimal routes to Edmonton restaurants on a map display.
Encrypted Arduino Communication
RSA-encrypted serial communication between Arduino boards using fast modular arithmetic.
Huffman Coding for File Compression
File compression tool implementing Huffman coding for efficient data encoding.