Hi, I'm Tyler Flar.
I'm a CS Master's student at UC San Diego, researching autonomous surgical robotics at the Advanced Robotics and Controls Lab and working with AquaMesh and the Scripps COOL Lab on the AquaSpectra water-quality sensor. I spent this summer at Brightree (a ResMed company) as a Technical Product Manager Intern, and before that led wildlife-tracking projects at Engineers for Exploration. On the side I build infrastructure for agents—Tasque and Jackdaw—and I like problems where robotics, machine learning, and dependable systems meet.
Interests
- Pickleball
- Cooking
- Gym
- Climbing
- Reading
- Drawing
- 3D modeling
- Video games
Experience
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.
Projects:AquaSpectra
Lab Member
UCSD Advanced Robotics and Controls Lab
La Jolla, CA · Hybrid
- Developing 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.
Projects:Endoscopic Navigation
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.
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.
Projects:Radio Telemetry Tracker · Baboons on the Move
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.
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.
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
CHASER: Robust Human Following on a Legged Robot Using Vision and Bluetooth
2026 IEEE/ASME International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics (AIM) · Genova, Italy
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.
Links:Paper · Project write-up
Education
Master's degree, Computer Science
UC San Diego
Bachelor's degree, Computer Science
UC San Diego
GPA: 3.8
Volunteering
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.