Photo of Rohit Mahesh

hello, i'm

Rohit Mahesh

I am a student at Columbia University studying computer science and mathematics in the school of engineering (SEAS).

I'm especially interested in embodied AI: how models perceive, act, and stay reliable in the physical world. More generally, I like building interesting software and chasing difficult questions wherever they lead.

The pattern on this page is Rule 110, a tiny Turing-complete cellular automaton, generated with SCSS and animated with pure CSS!

research

Zishen Wan Lab — reliable embodied AI
August 2026–present

I study whether the same hardware or system fault can change a robot's action and fool the monitor meant to catch it. I'm building fault-injection and evaluation tools around OpenVLA, LIBERO, and SAFE, with a focus on reproducible experiments and systematic fault selection.

AroraLab — computational reproductive biology
2023–present

I've spent several years building machine-learning tools that turn microscopy heatmaps into quantitative measurements. My most recent project adapts a U-Net, runs it with ONNX Runtime, and gives nontechnical lab members a review interface; it cut each analysis from about 30 minutes to 3. We're now moving it onto MSU servers and preparing a manuscript.

Sriram Lab — tuberculosis outcome prediction
Summer/Fall 2023

I developed a longitudinal medical-imaging pipeline for tuberculosis outcome prediction, extracting Vision Transformer representations from serial chest X-rays and modeling temporal disease progression with sequence-level aggregation.

engineering

Lenovo Qira AI — cross-device AI
June–August 2026

I was a core contributor on a four-person team building Lenovo's cross-device AI assistant. I shipped features for a major Windows and Android release in Kotlin and Rust, worked across on-device inference and device state, and often became the first call when Product or Design found something broken.

NewHaptics — Braille display software
Summers 2024 and 2025

I developed software for multiline tactile Braille displays, including an English-to-Braille translation engine, an accessible menu framework for tactile navigation, and low-latency audio cursor cues iterated with blind co-designers.

patents + publications

elsewhere

I am also interested in applied security, math competitions, and robotics.

In my free time I can be found playing horror video games or deep-diving into my OS stack (Artix with OpenRC)

Last updated: August 20, 2026