Mateo Taylor

Education

2 schools

University of Pennsylvania

4+1 M.S.E. in Computer & Information Science · Sep. 2025 – May 2028 · GPA 4.0

Coursework Machine Learning, Machine Perception

Activities Penn Poker Club, Competitive Programming @ Penn

Haverford College

B.S. in Computer Science & Sociology, Minor in Statistics · Sep. 2023 – May 2027 · GPA 3.9

Coursework Linear Algebra, Data Science, Advanced Multivariate Statistics

Activities Havercode President (HCCS), Hackathon Coordinator, Robotics TA, Sociology Research Assistant, Data Science TA

Work Experience

5 roles

DevOps Intern

Summer 2026

NBCUniversal

Stamford, CT

Developed custom EC2 lookup tools that accelerated diagnostic times and fortified infrastructure stability for a 15-engineer distribution team throughout high-stakes World Cup 2026 operations
Monitored GitHub and ArgoCD continuous delivery (CD) pipelines and engineered automated diffing tools, proactively mitigating broadcast risks for 150+ concurrent streaming channels.

Sociology Research Assistant

Sep. 2025 – May 2026

Haverford College

Haverford, PA

Ran statistical analyses and built a dataset on child support patterns across single-father households.
Used Python to process 3 million entries across 22 years of CPS economic data, cross-referencing details with the IPUMS and Census Bureau APIs.
Prepared datasets for submission to the 2026 ASA Conference.

Data Engineering Intern

Summer 2025

Roundhouse One

San Francisco, CA

Used Flutter to build an iOS mobile app for managing and tracking hardware deployments, reducing validation errors by 40%.
Integrated the app into AWS serverless infrastructure (API Gateway, Lambda, Redshift, S3), enabling secure data syncing.
App was used to automate data ingestion and deployments for a team of 20+ technicians and clients.

Computer Science Teaching Assistant

Sep. 2024 – Present

Haverford College

Haverford, PA

Teaching assistant for CS355: Robotics, CS260: Data Science, and CS105: Intro to Programming.
Mentor students in Python and machine learning techniques; responsibilities include facilitating weekly lab sessions, holding office hours, and grading assignments.

Summer Intern

Summer 2024

Aflac

Manhattan, NY

Led a team of 10 interns through researching quarterly financial documentation between 2022 and 2024.
Presented analysis on the impact of COVID-19 on Aflac US & Japan's fixed maturity securities portfolios.
Condensed findings into a 30-minute presentation for senior management.

Projects

7 projects

Personal Projects

Brawl Stars Reinforcement Learning

Jul. 2026 – Present

A reinforcement learning agent and computer vision pipeline that plays the mobile game Brawl Stars at a competitive level.
Trained with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) across 300 million matches inside a custom vectorized simulator.
Published YouTube videos documenting each stage of development as the project progressed, reaching 500,000+ views.

Rust Reinforcement Learning

Sep. 2025 – Jul. 2026

A reinforcement learning agent trained to gather resources in the 3D game environment of Rust.
Initialized with behavioral cloning on 10 hours of recorded data, then trained in a custom C# environment for over 500 hours of gameplay.
Final architecture uses a custom YOLOv26 visual backbone feeding a GRU action expert, trained with recurrent PPO.

Torn.com Company Data Tracker

Nov. 2024 – Jun. 2026

Engineered an automated daily ingestion pipeline with Python and AWS Lambda to track 300+ player-run companies over a 19-month period.
Treated a complex video game economy as a data science problem, analyzing strategies from real human competitors.
Applied statistical modeling to reverse engineer hidden game mechanics and calculate ideal workforce efficiency ratios.

Academic Projects

Senior Thesis: How Hackathons Prepare Students For Careers in Technology

SOCL217 & SOCL400 · Sep. 2025 – May 2027

A two year long qualitative research project examining how hackathon participation relates to startup development and the tech industry.
Involved participatory observation of 7+ hackathons across the East Coast plus semi-structured interviews with organizers and sponsors.
If you're an organizer, company, or VC fund that sponsors hackathons, I'd love to hear from you about your experience and insights. Feel free to reach out!

MessiBot — ACT Imitation Learning in Robotics

CS355 · Apr. 2026 – May 2026

Taught a Hugging Face SO-101 robot to shoot penalty kicks against a goalkeeper robot.
Used behavioral cloning to train an Action Chunking Transformer on 180 teleoperated episodes.
Presented final results to 50 students and faculty across the CS, physics, and math departments.

Predicting Traffic Congestion from Music Listening Patterns

CS5200 · Oct. 2025 – Dec. 2025

Graduate-level machine learning analysis predicting traffic accident severity from environmental, temporal, human, and musical factors.
Compared regression, tree-based models, and neural networks on 7.7 million accident records while evaluating the added value of Spotify charts data.
Presented final results to a recitation of graduate students and teaching assistants.

Brooklyn Housing Development Analysis

SOCL215 · Feb. 2025 – Sep. 2025

A 22-page statistical paper investigating 10-year zoning and housing growth trends in Brooklyn.
Builds on prior studies of Prospect Heights and Park Slope, focusing on city-subsidized luxury development and Prospect Lefferts' economic demographics.
Cleaned, merged, and visualized 65,000+ construction projects using R, GeoPandas, and ArcGIS.