Hi, I'm Tyler Flar.
I'm a CS Master's student at UC San Diego, currently researching real-time SLAM for surgical robotics at the Advanced Robotics and Controls Lab. Previously, I led wildlife-tracking projects at Engineers for Exploration, building drone-based radio telemetry systems and computer vision pipelines. I love tackling problems at the intersection of robotics, computer vision, and systems engineering.
Experience
Sep 2025 – Present
Graduate Student Researcher
UCSD Advanced Robotics and Controls Lab
La Jolla, CA · Hybrid
- Developing a real-time monocular SLAM pipeline for in-body 3D reconstruction (kidney/bladder) to autonomously steer a flexible surgical robot, leveraging motion priors and a rigorous review/evaluation of SOTA methods and open-source libraries.
- Projects: Kidney SLAM
Jan 2023 – Oct 2025
Project Lead
Engineers For Exploration
La Jolla, CA · Hybrid
- Lead two wildlife-tracking projects, mentoring rotating student teams (5–15 at a time, 20+ cumulatively) in building low-cost animal-monitoring systems.
- Projects: Radio Telemetry Tracker, Baboons on the Move
May 2025 – Sep 2025
Chief Engineer Intern
Leidos
Remote
- Led a DOJ monitoring revamp—evaluated monitoring tools, authored a finance-backed white-paper, and rolled out probes + ServiceNow alerts—saving $120K/yr and lifting critical portals to 99.9% uptime.
- Automated ATF-mandated RCA follow-ups with a C# parser that extracts action items from outage docs, builds a live Excel status sheet, and pushes tasks via REST to ServiceNow.
Mar 2024 – Sep 2025
Teaching Assistant
UC San Diego CSE Department
La Jolla, CA · Hybrid
- Co-taught UCSD's core Algorithms sequence for 100+ students: designed walkthroughs on graphs, greedy/DP, and divide-and-conquer; provided one-on-one and group tutoring; earned consistently Strongly Positive TA evaluations.
Jun 2023 – Sep 2023
System Engineering Intern
Cubic Transportation Systems
San Diego, CA · On-site
- Automated requirement traceability with a Python + DXL tool pulling DOORS requirements and TestRail results into a live matrix, cutting a month of manual cross-checking to ~30 minutes.
- Streamlined analytics for the San Francisco Clipper Card back office via parameterized SQL scripts, letting clients answer 80%+ of recurring data requests instantly.
Education
2025 – 2026
Master's degree, Computer Science
UC San Diego
GPA: 3.4
2021 – 2025
Bachelor's degree, Computer Science
UC San Diego
GPA: 3.8
Volunteering
Apr 2023 – Jun 2024
Founding President
Triton Tails
Arts and Culture
- Founded a student organization by leadership protocols, handled official registration, coordinated teams, and spearheaded merchandise art initiatives, resulting in 400+ members in only a year.