Chuma Kabaghe

Building a better tomorrow, one line of code at a time.

Hi there!
I enjoy using technology to implement new ideas, especially ones that solve real-world problems. I am particularly interested in how we can use data and technology to augment human decision-making.

I've led teams at Clockwise, built scalable products at Microsoft, and taught at Stanford. I'm a lifelong learner who enjoys trying new things. Some would say my favourite hobby is trying new hobbies.

One of my most memorable projects was trying to determine if there were other audio clips like the famous laurel/yanny one. It's a clip where some people hear the word laurel and others hear yanny! My research resulted in the publication of a paper, but it also made me lose a little bit of trust in my sense of hearing.

Experience

Founder

Fun things are brewing... May 2023 - Present

Tech Lead/ Senior Software Engineer

Clockwise April 2020 - February 2023

Clockwise optimizes team calendars to create more time in everyone’s day. It creates blocks of uniterrupted Focus time, resolves conflicts, suggests optimal meeting times, and ensures you have time to eat lunch.

I led teams and built many parts of the product during a period of rapid user growth. Examples include: Clockwise Links, Calendar Smart holds One-On-One Meeting Dashboard Clockwise's Asana App, and Clockwise's Slack App
You can read more about my work here: Meet Chuma Kabaghe, Back-End Engineer at Clockwise

Course Assistant

Stanford University September 2018 - March 2020

CS 221 - Artificial Intelligence: Principles and Techniques - 3 quarters
CS 124 - From Languages to Information - 2 quarters

Software Engineer

Microsoft August 2015 - August 2018

Drove team strategy and designed service architecture for Mixed Reality Avatars
Implemented and shipped scalable Azure cloud-based rendering and capture service for new expressive and inclusive Xbox avatars
Designed and Developed .NET web service that mitigates fraud risk when purchasing Microsoft Office products
Built web and universal windows platform prototypes used to test and validate ideas for the next generation of Windows first party applications

Software Engineering Intern/ Kleiner Perkins Fellow

Coursera June 2019 - September 2019

Designed push notification infrastructure and migrated learner goal service from long polling to webhooks
Implemented APIs and updated scheduled jobs to show instructors true send status of course announcements
Updated branding of all in course Coursera emails to include university logos and live event reminder emails to display alternate time zones

Software Engineering Intern

Microsoft June 2014 - August 2014

Extracted and analyzed Windows Phone data to obtain key metrics and business insights
Created a Power BI dashboard to visualize WindowsPhone.com metrics

Explorer Intern

Microsoft May 2013 - August 2013

Rotated through three core tech disciplines at Microsoft: Program Manager, Software Development Engineer and Software Development Engineer in Test.
Created an Outlook mail application that provided flight status information and allowed users to add flights to their calendar

Lead ECE Engineering Learning Assistant

University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign August 2013 - December 2014

Trained 20 learning assistants, reviewed and provided feedback on their lesson plans.
Led a class of 20 first year students building Arduino microcontroller projects.
Organized the first ever Arduino competition for first year ECE students and secured corporate sponsorship for awards.

Projects

Player Snapshot was born out of my desire for a quick and easy way to look up women's soccer players during the 2023 World Cup. I wanted to know what clubs they played for and learn more about them.
Verdle: I was curious how hard Wordle would be without the yellow squares, so I built Verdle, a Wordle clone without the yellow squares. Only the verde green ones! Play it here: https://chumakabaghe.com/verdle . Building it was a fun way to learn React. Link to source code.
Describe That GIF – A GIF description generator using a CNN-LSTM model trained on TGIF dataset. report. poster
Should You Book That Flight? – Flight delay prediction using logistic regression and an artificial neural network trained on data from the bureau of transportation statistics
Classifying Tweets Based on Climate Change Stance – tweet classification using semi supervised methods: self-training, semi-supervised SVM, and Multinomial Naïve Bayes with EM. report. poster
Optimization of Insulin Dosing in Diabetic Patients with POMDPs.

Education

Stanford University

Master of Science

Computer Science focus in Artificial Intelligence

September 2018 - June 2020

University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

Bachelor of Science - Honors

Computer Engineering

Classes I enjoyed

Stanford

The Lean LaunchPad (ENGR 245)

Incentives in Computer Science (CS 269I)

The Modern Algorithmic Toolbox (CS 168)

Deep Learning (CS 230)

UIUC

Artificial Intelligence (ECE 448)

Making Sense of Big Data (ECE 398BD)

Innovation and Engineering Design (ECE 398PSC)

From Idea to Enterprise (TE 298)

Data Structures (CS 225)

Discrete Structures (CS 173)

Skills

Programming Languages & Tools

Java
Python
Typescript
React
C#
Git

Achievements

Kartik Chandra, Chuma Kabaghe and Gregory Valiant, Beyond Laurel/Yanny: An Autoencoder-Enabled Search for Polyperceivable Audio. ACL, 2021.

KABAGHE Chuma; et al. 2019. Enhanced Storytelling With Auto-Generated Content And Annotations. U.S. Patent 20190243873 issued August 8, 2019

Kleiner Perkins Engineering Fellow (2019)
Chicago Innovation Exchange Summer Fellowship (2015)
Finalist in Cozad New Venture Competition (2015)
Leung Student Venture Fund Award (2015)
Microsoft College Scholarship recognizing passion for technology, academic excellence, and leadership (2013-2015)
Ellery Paine Outstanding Junior Award for academic excellence and demonstrated leadership ability (2014)
Oakley Scholarship awarded to outstanding sophomore active in technical and professional societies (2013)