Asher Arya

A language built for Void Mining, a Unity game I'm making where players program their own autonomous mining bots.

• Engineered a full end-to-end execution pipeline for a custom statically typed language in C# by implementing a hand-written scanner, recursive-descent parser with operator precedence, and AST resolver/typer pass specified via a formal EBNF grammar.
• Resolved function call ambiguity and enforced type safety by engineering a two-phase overload resolution system that evaluates exact parameter matches before traversing a custom type-promotion lattice across nested lexical scopes.
• Wired a test harness into GitHub Actions that expands JSON specifications and test directories into a 283-case regression suite, generating source scripts, expected outputs, and test names, grouped by purpose, automatically.

• Published a first-author FSE 2026 companion paper by architecting a neuro-symbolic verification framework that routes PRISM model checker feedback directly into LLM planning pipelines to enforce formal safety guarantees on generated outputs.
• Increased plan execution success rates by 10-40% by modeling spatial planning constraints as Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) to supply formal verification conditions against an LTL-enhanced reinforcement learning baseline.
• Demonstrated that closed-loop model-checker feedback scales positively with model size and outperforms context repetition by benchmarking five automated feedback mechanisms across three model sizes using OpenAI and Gemini APIs.

• Supported 14 active users across production services by deploying unprivileged LXC containers on an Ansible-provisioned Proxmox hypervisor and configuring NVIDIA GPU passthrough to enable high-efficiency NVENC hardware transcoding.
• Centralized identity management across all downstream services by deploying Authentik as an authoritative user store to serve LDAP and OIDC protocols with group-based bind policies and a custom enrollment flow.
• Enforced strict zero-trust security and dropped lateral container traffic by configuring default-deny host firewalls and per-container Terraform security groups to allow-list only required service ports.

An action-roguelike set in a massive industrial complex consumed by four autonomous, corrupted AI factories. You play successive iterations of a robot built by the Mother of Preservation, sent down to destroy the Mothers of Dispersion, Recycling, and Propagation. Salvaged scrap is sent back up to permanently upgrade your factory between runs.

• Built with a team of five at UBC on our own bespoke engine.
• Wrote the core systems: physics engine, ECS registry, procedural map generation, collision detection, and dialogue boxes.

• Ran weekly Scrum ceremonies, sprint reviews, and demo-day evaluations for 6 student teams shipping software for industry and clinical partners (SickKids, Korotu), assessing progress against user stories, technical depth, and deployment readiness.
• Drove SickKids' Echo Talk speech-therapy app to selection at the UofT Software Engineering Showcase by shaping per-user Azure speech models for dysarthria and stuttering, giving iterative feedback across four deliverables, and cutting scope to a shippable MVP.

• Streamlined the digital storefront experience by developing custom CSS templates and writing client-side JavaScript to dynamically render promotional cards within Shopify collection product grids during a major migration to a modern e-commerce platform.
• Cut manual product cataloguing by over 90% by deploying a TypeScript (Node.js) and PostgreSQL microservice on Render that used the Shopify Admin API to group and retitle newly imported products by populating custom metafields, eliminating manual entry.
• Saved 10+ hours per week of manual merging by engineering a GitHub Actions CI/CD workflow that synced 6 designers' Shopify theme branches, replacing Shopify's manual copy-paste process with one-click merges and production releases.

• Increased department productivity by 10% by developing and shipping an internal workflow and issue-tracking service in Microsoft Power Apps, iterating on direct feedback from executive leadership to eliminate operational bottlenecks.
• Drove real-time market transparency for key investors and stakeholders by building a high-throughput React dashboard with automated polling to visualize, monitor, and analyze live energy pricing fluctuations.
• Accelerated feature deployment cycles and reduced production runtime errors by engineering automated Jest/React testing suites and refactoring SQL query logic to optimize data retrieval pipelines across enterprise energy management tools.

• Courses: Automated Reasoning with Machine Learning (A+), Neural Networks and Deep Learning (A+), Software Engineering for Machine Learning (A+).

• Courses: DSA (96%), Numerical Analysis (91%), Artificial Intelligence (93%), Intelligent Systems (96%), Software Construction and Object-Oriented Programming (97%), Applied Machine Learning (94%).
• Awards and Recognitions: Science Scholar Dean's Honour List (min. 90% avg.), Dean of Science Scholarship (awarded by faculty), Charles & Jane Banks Scholarship (faculty recommendation), Trek Excellence Scholarship for Continuing Students (top 5% of year)