Tanay Joshi · Class of 2027 · The Woodlands, TX
Published research in wireless networking, adaptive communication systems, and educational access.
The first thing I ever built for someone else was a workaround for a projector that kept dying.
The summer before sophomore year, I tutored kids in low-income housing through SEWA. I showed up with lesson plans and a laptop in my backpack, assuming I was the one with something to teach. Then a kid named Omar beat me at soccer, twice, and raced me through multiplication problems just to get back outside faster. These weren't kids who needed saving. They were kids exactly like me, competitive, curious, and stubborn, who happened to have access to fewer resources.
What they didn't have was infrastructure. Half the time the room's technology didn't work, so I started hauling my own from home, my laptop and HDMI cables, whatever it took to get a lesson onto the screen. When the projector died, learning stopped with it. That was the summer I understood something I've built around ever since: the gap between a kid who gets the chance and a kid who doesn't is usually not talent. It's access. And access is something you can engineer.
Everything on this site is a version of that idea. A compression controller that keeps a drone's video alive when the network is collapsing. A LiFi system for the places radio can't safely reach. A budget platform for a nonprofit that was running on crumpled receipts. Different problems, same question underneath: who gets left out when the system assumes everyone already has what they need?
My engineering philosophy is simple. Build it until it fails, then understand why. The failures are where the real problem actually lives, and the real problem is almost never the one you set out to solve. I'm drawn to the boundary between hardware and people, because that's where a dropped packet stops being a number and starts being a missed medication dose, or a kid in a tutoring room waiting on a projector that won't turn on.
I'm not done building. I don't think I will be.
Developed a dynamic JPEG compression framework that adjusts quality levels based on real-time Round-Trip Time (RTT) measurements. The system targets drone swarms relaying imagery in areas with no infrastructure, like disaster zones, mountain rescues, and rural medicine drops, where standard fixed-quality approaches fail under congestion.
Hardware testing showed latency reductions of 41–83% under degraded network conditions. (Technical: statistical validation using mixed-effects modeling, p < 0.001, tested on Raspberry Pi 5 using Linux Traffic Control (tc) to simulate real congestion.)
A system that dynamically reduces image quality during network congestion and restores it when bandwidth recovers, cutting latency by up to 83% when a drone's video link would otherwise collapse.
A novel application-layer compression control method solving the bandwidth saturation cliff in multi-node wireless networks. The controller reduces compression fidelity aggressively upon congestion and recovers it conservatively, an asymmetric ratcheting effect that biases the system toward bandwidth preservation. A proportional hysteresis deadband prevents oscillation at threshold boundaries.
Empirical validation across 50 trials: 83% latency reduction vs. static compression (0.926s vs. 5.468s). Zero oscillation events. r = −0.668, p < 0.001. Covers UAV swarms, FANETs, mobile robotics, satellite uplinks, edge AI nodes, IoT sensor swarms, and disaster-response mesh systems.
Addressed a gap in connectivity research: most WiFi studies focus on dense urban deployments. In low-density settings (1–5 users), WiFi congestion behaves differently, and LiFi's signal confinement becomes a practical security and performance advantage.
Engineered hardware switching logic using an MCP3008 ADC and photodiode on the Raspberry Pi 5 (SPI interface via MOSI/MISO pins 19, 21, 23, 24). The system prioritizes LiFi when ambient light exceeds 1.65V. WiFi held a 20ms baseline; LiFi showed a 10% improvement in high-brightness conditions, with validated signal confinement as a physical-layer security benefit.
An AI-powered tool that helps users audit their own media consumption and flag synthetic or misleading content. Optimized for browser-side inference using TensorFlow.js so all analysis runs locally and no data leaves the device, ensuring 100% user privacy. Built on the idea that critical thinking is a skill you can engineer for.
Founded and built a budget management platform now managing financial workflows for a nonprofit theater company. The centralized MVC architecture replaced a spreadsheet-and-email system, reducing administrative overhead by around 75%. Built iteratively with the theater managers: they told me what was broken, I fixed it, repeat.
Designed, built, and presented the entire platform as sole technical architect, from database schema to the live judge demo. Connects under-resourced students with peer tutors in real time. The students most likely to need help are also least likely to have a private tutor at home; this was built for them.
Selected as 1 of 100 students for Rice University's STEM Young Scholars workshop. Led hardware design of an autonomous supply system for temperature-sensitive Rheumatoid Arthritis medication across a 200-mile Himalayan route. The core challenge: vibration at altitude degrades drug potency. Solution: a payload chamber using carbon fiber, EVA foam, and rubberized damping with triangular structural geometry to neutralize resonance frequencies.
Every project here traces back to a single question I first ran into in a SEWA tutoring room: who gets left out when a system assumes everyone already has what they need?
A projector that died mid-lesson taught me that the bottleneck on opportunity is rarely talent. It's infrastructure. SEWA tutoring and the SAT peer-tutoring platform attack that gap at the human layer, connecting students who need help with the people who can give it. MyShowBucks rebuilt a nonprofit's finances when its "system" was a pile of receipts. And my research in adaptive UAV compression and hybrid LiFi-WiFi attacks the same gap at the physical layer, keeping information flowing where networks are unreliable, congested, or absent entirely.
Communication systems are where access is won or lost. A dropped packet can mean a missed medication delivery; a dead network handoff can mean a student who never gets the help they were promised. I want to engineer the infrastructure that decides who gets included.
