Tyler Flar portrait

Hi, I'm Tyler Flar.

I'm a CS Master's student at UC San Diego, working with AquaMesh and the Scripps COOL Lab on the AquaSpectra water-quality sensor. In May 2026 I founded Lycanworks, a VRChat avatar studio, and I run it end to end, from the paperwork to the Python tooling behind its releases. I spent summer 2026 at Brightree (a ResMed company) as a Technical Product Manager Intern; before that I researched autonomous surgical robotics at the Advanced Robotics and Controls Lab and led wildlife-tracking projects at Engineers for Exploration. On the side I build infrastructure for agents—Tasque and Jackdaw. I like problems where robotics, machine learning, and dependable systems meet.

Interests

  • Pickleball
  • Cooking
  • Gym
  • Climbing
  • Reading
  • Drawing
  • 3D modeling
  • Video games

Experience

Sep 2026 – Present

Project Member

AquaMesh

La Jolla, CA · Hybrid

  • Working with AquaMesh and the Scripps COOL Lab to get AquaSpectra, an in-water optical water-quality sensor, ready for research use: the remaining software interface, the calibration workflow, and sensor tuning across marine conditions.
May 2026 – Present

Founder

Lycanworks

San Diego, CA · Remote

  • Founded a VRChat avatar studio and run it end to end—its registration, banking and payments, storefront, website, Discord, and Instagram—with Python tooling built for its releases and its operations run through Tasque.
Jun 2026 – Sep 2026

Technical Product Manager Intern

Brightree

San Diego, CA · Hybrid

  • Built the docs-as-code toolchain behind Brightree's 27 customer-facing API reference guides, then analyzed 553M production API requests to write the usage report and SOAP deprecation plan behind Brightree's API modernization.
Sep 2025 – Jun 2026

Lab Member

UCSD Advanced Robotics and Controls Lab

La Jolla, CA · Hybrid

  • Worked toward an autonomous navigation system for flexible ureteroscopy that uses pre-operative CT to extract the kidney's graph topology and guides a monocular robotic endoscope via graph-based localization and depth-based junction detection.
Jan 2023 – Oct 2025

Project Lead

Engineers for Exploration

La Jolla, CA · Hybrid

  • Led two wildlife-tracking projects and mentored rotating student teams (5–15 active at a time; 20+ cumulatively) building low-cost animal-monitoring systems.
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/year and raising critical portal uptime to 99.9%.
  • Automated ATF-mandated RCA follow-ups with a C# parser that extracts action items from outage docs, builds a live Excel status tracker, 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

Systems Engineering Intern

Cubic Transportation Systems

San Diego, CA · Hybrid

  • Automated requirements traceability with a Python + DXL tool that pulls DOORS requirements and TestRail results into a live matrix, cutting ~1 month of manual cross-checking to ~30 minutes.
  • Streamlined analytics for the San Francisco Clipper Card back office via parameterized SQL scripts, enabling clients to resolve 80%+ of recurring data requests instantly.

Publications

Jul 2026

CHASER: Robust Human Following on a Legged Robot Using Vision and Bluetooth

2026 IEEE/ASME International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics (AIM) · Genova, Italy

Julian Raheema, Connor Gag, Tyler Flar, Helena Bender, Matthew Zheng, Kurt Talke, Ryan Kastner, and Henrik I. Christensen

Contribution: the Bluetooth angle-of-arrival module—BLE AoA plus RSSI ranging on a Silicon Labs antenna array, fused into the heading cue that steers the robot back toward its operator when vision loses them.

Education

Apr 2025 – Expected Mar 2027

Master's degree, Computer Science

UC San Diego

Sep 2021 – Mar 2025

Bachelor's degree, Computer Science

UC San Diego

GPA: 3.8

Volunteering

May 2023 – Jun 2025

Founding President

Triton Tails

  • 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.