I'm a high school senior in Suwanee, Georgia. I build purpose-oriented software for air quality and food waste, and I research the data behind it.
What I'm building#
Nova Core
Eight AI agents read a company's customer data, flag who's about to leave, and say why.
A.E.R.I.S
Checks AI air quality claims against real sensor data, aiming to reduce the need for expert labelling.
FreshTrack
Scan a barcode, get expiry alerts and recipes before food goes bad. 100+ users.
First Step
Student run environmental nonprofit in metro Atlanta. 300+ volunteers, 250+ events.
Research#
I research air quality with Dr. Annalisa Bracco at Georgia Tech and Dr. Lester Mackey, a MacArthur Fellow who does machine learning at Microsoft Research and Stanford. My work was accepted through double-blind peer review at NeurIPS 2026 AI4Science, organized by researchers at Harvard, MIT and Google DeepMind. I'll be presenting it in person in Sydney in December. Our abstract was also accepted to the AGU 2026 Annual Meeting, the largest gathering of Earth and space scientists.
Last summer I was selected for NASA SCHAR, a research internship at George Mason. I worked with NASA TESS and JWST data under Dr. Peter Plavchan, principal investigator of NASA's Landolt Space Mission, and first-authored a paper on TOI 3505.01.
I also spent a summer at Stanford studying natural language processing, where I built language models from scratch and a tool that learns when browsing turns into distraction.
Endeavors#
Stack#
Mostly Python and TypeScript. I publish machine learning notebooks on Kaggle, and everything I build is on github.com/mason-cao (0 public repos).
What's next#
- 2031 Write software that makes a real and scalable difference for the environment, bench 225, do my first muscle-up, and complete and memorize Chopin's Ballade No. 3.
- 2041 Create a platform that millions of people rely on every day, have 3 kids and a dog, and buy a home on a secluded beach.
- 2056 Keep my wife's depreciating café afloat, fund startups working on climate solutions, and be able to tackle every home project.
Say hi#
Happy to hear from you!
