Hi! I'm Devan, an MSc student at the University of Toronto part of the computational linguistics lab, supervised by Dr. Gerald Penn. My research interests revolve around semantics, reasoning, and a little philosophy as well as machine learning interpetability. Irrespective of academia, I generally love building and solving meaningful problems. In my free time I like playing soccer and boxing.

AND CONTRIBUTIONS

I sought to investigate the interpretability of diffusion models for image generation. I used a simple model, and trained it to generate digits. I then used various ML interpretability techniques to investigate any patterns and "interpretable" observations in the model. This was an undergraduate research project.

Our team investigated incorporating value based gradients, and multistep prediction in the dreaming process within the DreamerV2 model. DreamerV2 was previously SOTA (replaced by DreamerV3) on long-term RL planning tasks (like Minecraft). My main contribution was the value based gradients, training and evaluating the model, and helping with the paper. This was an undergraduate research project.

I built a transpiler from Harlowe 3.3.6 to Javascript that generates the according JSON 6 object, using abstract syntax trees, grammar, and the ANTLR parser. It was designed to allow for cross-story Twine compilation and runtime environments. I included in the project, an example of integration with JS into an existing Twine game.
Summer 2025

Internship | Pinterest
2024 - 2026

University of Toronto
Summer 2024

Enginable
Spring 2024

Internship | embARC
Fall 2023

Koala Studios
Summer 2023

Internship | Steamlabs
2022 - 2023

Mathamoo
Summer 2022

Deloitte
Summer 2021

Internship | University of Toronto - Social Science Research Team
Summer 2021

Internship | University of Toronto - CS Dept.
2020 - 2024

University of Toronto