Amil’s Story

Born and raised in the Silicon Valley in an immigrant family, Amil attended homeschooling and began studying at community college while 14 years old. Amil father's dedication to social service shaped him, with a childhood filled with volunteer activities such as feeding the homeless at soup kitchens. Soon after, Amil's father passed away in a fatal car crash with a drunk driver. Although struggling emotionally with the loss of his hero, Amil took his first job as a software consultant developing image recognition technology for automated grading of tests in K-12 schools.

After receiving his B.A. in Computer Science from University of California, Berkeley, Amil joined Hewlett-Packard (HP) in Silicon Valley to work full-time as a software engineer developing security log standardization software for ArcSight, a Security Information and Event Management System (SIEM).

Seeking a new home, Amil transferred to HP’s Tokyo headquarters to take on a role as cybersecurity consultant, in which he traveled across Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Australia to deploy SIEM solutions at customer sites in the banking industry.

Thereafter, Amil returned to Silicon Valley to join Pivotal Software as a software engineer working primarily on the Postgres-based open source Greenplum OLAP database. In Pivotal’s extreme programming (XP) environment, Amil practiced several software development practices, including daily pair programming, test-driven development (TDD), and weekly retroactive meetings, while rotating across several teams, including DevOps, database backend, and workload management tooling.

In 2018, Amil took leave from work to move to the countryside of Japan. Living in Eiheiji town, the birthplace of Soto Zen, Amil meditated daily and learned Zen philosophy, while giving back teaching agile programming to young adults and children. Soon, Amil was appointed Evolution Ambassador of the town and sent to the One Young World conference in the Netherlands to represent Japan, amongst other young social impact leaders, country heads, and Nobel Laureates from 195 countries.

Amil shaking hands at the One Young World conference

In late 2019, Amil left his job to pursue graduate studies in Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University, taking his first courses with Coursera founder Dr. Andrew Ng and ImageNet creator Dr. Fei-Fei Li. When the pandemic hit, Amil committed himself to pandemic relief efforts and soon founded Virufy.

Virufy is a nonprofit organization developing a smartphone app to prescreen for COVID-19 instantly through AI-powered analysis of voice and cough recordings. As of July 2024, the organization operates in a three continents with more than 250 volunteers and 60 partner organizations.

Amil’s Publications

2022. Using Deep Learning with Large Aggregated Datasets for COVID-19 Classification from Cough. arXiv: 2201.01669

2021. Using a Novel COVID-19 Calculator to Measure Positive U.S. Socio-Economic Impact of a COVID-19 Pre-Screening Solution (AI/ML). arXiv: 2201.11109

2020. Virufy: Global Applicability of AI Detection for COVID-19 from Cough Recordings. arXiv: 2011.13320

2020. Fusical: Multimodal Fusion for Video Sentiment. ACM ICMI; DOI: 3382507.3417966

2020. Facial Expression Recognition with Deep Learning. arXiv: 2004.11823

Amil’s Story

Born and raised in the Silicon Valley in an immigrant family, Amil attended homeschooling and began studying at community college while 14 years old. Amil father's dedication to social service shaped him, with a childhood filled with volunteer activities such as feeding the homeless at soup kitchens. Soon after, Amil's father passed away in a fatal car crash with a drunk driver. Although struggling emotionally with the loss of his hero, Amil took his first job as a software consultant developing image recognition technology for automated grading of tests in K-12 schools.

After receiving his B.A. in Computer Science from University of California, Berkeley, Amil joined Hewlett-Packard (HP) in Silicon Valley to work full-time as a software engineer developing security log standardization software for ArcSight, a Security Information and Event Management System (SIEM).

Seeking a new home, Amil transferred to HP’s Tokyo headquarters to take on a role as cybersecurity consultant, in which he traveled across Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Australia to deploy SIEM solutions at customer sites in the banking industry.

Thereafter, Amil returned to Silicon Valley to join Pivotal Software as a software engineer working primarily on the Postgres-based open source Greenplum OLAP database. In Pivotal’s extreme programming (XP) environment, Amil practiced several software development practices, including daily pair programming, test-driven development (TDD), and weekly retroactive meetings, while rotating across several teams, including DevOps, database backend, and workload management tooling.

In 2018, Amil took leave from work to move to the countryside of Japan. Living in Eiheiji town, the birthplace of Soto Zen, Amil meditated daily and learned Zen philosophy, while giving back teaching agile programming to young adults and children. Soon, Amil was appointed Evolution Ambassador of the town and sent to the One Young World conference in the Netherlands to represent Japan, amongst other young social impact leaders, country heads, and Nobel Laureates from 195 countries.

In late 2019, Amil left his job to pursue graduate studies in Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University, taking his first courses with Coursera founder Dr. Andrew Ng and ImageNet creator Dr. Fei-Fei Li. When the pandemic hit, Amil committed himself to pandemic relief efforts and soon founded Virufy.

Virufy is a nonprofit organization developing a smartphone app to prescreen for COVID-19 instantly through AI-powered analysis of voice and cough recordings. As of July 2024, the organization operates in a three continents with more than 250 volunteers and 60 partner organizations.

Amil’s Publications

2022. Using Deep Learning with Large Aggregated Datasets for COVID-19 Classification from Cough. arXiv: 2201.01669

2021. Using a Novel COVID-19 Calculator to Measure Positive U.S. Socio-Economic Impact of a COVID-19 Pre-Screening Solution (AI/ML). arXiv: 2201.11109

2020. Virufy: Global Applicability of AI Detection for COVID-19 from Cough Recordings. arXiv: 2011.13320

2020. Fusical: Multimodal Fusion for Video Sentiment. ACM ICMI; DOI: 3382507.3417966

2020. Facial Expression Recognition with Deep Learning. arXiv: 2004.11823

Amil’s Story

Born and raised in the Silicon Valley in an immigrant family, Amil attended homeschooling and began studying at community college while 14 years old. Amil father's dedication to social service shaped him, with a childhood filled with volunteer activities such as feeding the homeless at soup kitchens. Soon after, Amil's father passed away in a fatal car crash with a drunk driver. Although struggling emotionally with the loss of his hero, Amil took his first job as a software consultant developing image recognition technology for automated grading of tests in K-12 schools.

After receiving his B.A. in Computer Science from University of California, Berkeley, Amil joined Hewlett-Packard (HP) in Silicon Valley to work full-time as a software engineer developing security log standardization software for ArcSight, a Security Information and Event Management System (SIEM).

Seeking a new home, Amil transferred to HP’s Tokyo headquarters to take on a role as cybersecurity consultant, in which he traveled across Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Australia to deploy SIEM solutions at customer sites in the banking industry.

Thereafter, Amil returned to Silicon Valley to join Pivotal Software as a software engineer working primarily on the Postgres-based open source Greenplum OLAP database. In Pivotal’s extreme programming (XP) environment, Amil practiced several software development practices, including daily pair programming, test-driven development (TDD), and weekly retroactive meetings, while rotating across several teams, including DevOps, database backend, and workload management tooling.

In 2018, Amil took leave from work to move to the countryside of Japan. Living in Eiheiji town, the birthplace of Soto Zen, Amil meditated daily and learned Zen philosophy, while giving back teaching agile programming to young adults and children. Soon, Amil was appointed Evolution Ambassador of the town and sent to the One Young World conference in the Netherlands to represent Japan, amongst other young social impact leaders, country heads, and Nobel Laureates from 195 countries.

In late 2019, Amil left his job to pursue graduate studies in Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University, taking his first courses with Coursera founder Dr. Andrew Ng and ImageNet creator Dr. Fei-Fei Li. When the pandemic hit, Amil committed himself to pandemic relief efforts and soon founded Virufy.

Virufy is a nonprofit organization developing a smartphone app to prescreen for COVID-19 instantly through AI-powered analysis of voice and cough recordings. As of July 2024, the organization operates in a three continents with more than 250 volunteers and 60 partner organizations.

Amil’s Publications

2022. Using Deep Learning with Large Aggregated Datasets for COVID-19 Classification from Cough. arXiv: 2201.01669

2021. Using a Novel COVID-19 Calculator to Measure Positive U.S. Socio-Economic Impact of a COVID-19 Pre-Screening Solution (AI/ML). arXiv: 2201.11109

2020. Virufy: Global Applicability of AI Detection for COVID-19 from Cough Recordings. arXiv: 2011.13320

2020. Fusical: Multimodal Fusion for Video Sentiment. ACM ICMI; DOI: 3382507.3417966

2020. Facial Expression Recognition with Deep Learning. arXiv: 2004.11823