Hayden Housen

San Francisco, CA ·
PDF Resume

Co-founder at Treblo (YC W24), building an AI music editor that turns prompts, lyrics, and melodies into full songs in any style. Studied computer science at Cornell University. Previously, a software engineering intern at Vocode (YC W23) and an intern on the Machine Learning Team at Ada.

Researched unsupervised object discovery with Dr. Kevin Ellis as a sophomore and paraphrase identification (published in NeurIPS 2022) with Dr. Sernam Lim as a freshman. Researched automatic classroom lecture summarization using AI and deep learning in high school. Developed a state-of-the-art neural text summarization system with 430+ stars on GitHub. Publishes guides for cybersecurity challenges and has completed Advent of Code annually for 6+ years. Enjoys running year-round and skiing in the winter.

This site was generated using HUGO from my fork of an open source theme via Netlify.

Experience

Co-founder and CTO @ Treblo (YC W24)

AI Music Generator/Editor

Treblo is an AI music editor that turns prompts, lyrics, or melodies into full songs in any style.

Jan 2024 – Present

Software Engineering Intern @ Vocode (YC W23)

Open-source tool to build voice-based LLM applications

  • Collaborated directly with founders as a pivotal engineer to shape Vocode’s pioneering AI-driven call automation solutions.
  • Demonstrated versatility as a fullstack developer by building the FastAPI backend, open-source self-hosted service (Python and asyncio), and frontend dashboard (Next.js), while also resolving issues and reviewing pull requests from the community.
  • Evaluated the latencies of multiple LLMs, speech-to-text APIs, and synthesis services to enhance Vocode’s performance.

May 2023 – Aug 2023

Undergraduate Researcher @ Cornell

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Research

Sep 2021 – May 2023

Machine Learning Intern @ Ada Support

Improved Ada’s intent classification pipeline

  • Improved Ada’s production accuracy by 8% using only 3% of production data by developing a novel intent classification pipeline.
  • Conducted >60 experiments and trained >110 models to determine the most accurate methodology.
  • Experimented with knowledge transfer, unsupervised learning of sentence embeddings, multi-task learning, and contrastive losses in the context of transformers and support vector machines.

May 2022 – Aug 2022

Machine Learning Intern @ Ada Support

Improved multilingual understanding for Ada’s AI chatbots

  • Led the discovery and experimentation phases of a project to enable Ada chatbots to better understand non-English languages.
  • Wrote a data processing pipeline to efficiently clean and analyze 9 billion chat messages for machine learning models.
  • Researched novel techniques in multilingual intent prediction and cultivated skills in PyTorch, transformers, and pandas.

May 2021 – Aug 2021

lecture2notes

Summarizing Lecture Videos by Classifying Slides and Analyzing Text

  • Created a state-of-the-art system to summarize classroom lectures using PyTorch, transformers (BERT), optical character recognition, speech to text, and convolutional neural networks. Source on GitHub. Learn more in the research paper.
  • Named a top 300 scholar in the 2021 Regeneron Science Talent Search, the nation’s oldest and most prestigious science and math competition for high school seniors.
  • Deployed ML pipeline in production via a full-stack website powered by Docker, Flask, Celery, Bootstrap, and Stripe.
  • More info on the project page.

Sep 2019 – Jan 2022

TransformerSum

Open-Source Neural Summarization Library

  • Furthered research in neural-network text summarization with a focus on long document summarization. 310+ stars on GitHub.
  • 4.45x smaller than the state-of-the-art model but 94% as accurate at release. 10+ pre-trained models available.
  • Rewrote researchers' code with enhanced performance and a focus on code readability and thorough documentation.
  • More info on the project page.

Mar 2020 – Oct 2020

Cybersecurity Challenges

Ethical Hacking Skills

  • Placed 23rd (top 0.7%) in 2021 National Cyber Scholarship Competition.
  • Placed in top 3% on average in PicoCTF 2019/2021/2022 competitions. Wrote technical guides with over 94,000 views to document my learning and help others.
  • Continuously practicing cybersecurity principles by solving HackTheBox.com machines and publishing writeups.
  • Learned ethical hacking skills including web exploitation, cryptography, reverse engineering, and binary exploitation. Worked with popular tools included in Kali Linux.

Sep 2019 – Present

Projects

Collection of Projects Created by Hayden

lecture2notes

For this project, I was named a top 300 Regeneron STS scholar. Lecture2notes is a state-of-the-art system to summarize classroom lectures using machine learning.

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TransformerSum

Models to perform neural summarization (extractive and abstractive) using machine learning transformers. 400+ stars on GitHub.

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Will I Have a Snow Day

130,000+ users in winter 2024. Simply enter your zip code and an advanced AI will calculate your chance of having a snow day for the next few days.

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Unsupervised Object Discovery

An implementation of several state-of-the-art machine learning models that discover objects in images without being told what an object is.

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PicoCTF 2019 Writeup

My solutions to the PicoCTF 2019 computer security competition. I scored 13,900 points (top 3.8%) during the competition but have since completed all the problems to reach 34,201 points.

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National Cyber Scholarship Competition 2021 Writeup

I was named a National Cyber Scholar with Honors for placing 23rd out of 3,277 (top 0.7%) in this cybersecurity competition.

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Advent of Code

My Python solutions to 6+ years of Advent of Code puzzles.

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Speaker Change Detection

An implementation of a machine learning architecture that detects when the current speaker changes in an audio file.

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PicoCTF 2021 Writeup

My solutions to the PicoCTF 2021 computer security competition. I scored 5,440 points (top 1.1%) during the competition as a solo player and placed 25th among US Middle/High School students.

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PicoCTF 2022 Writeup

My solutions to the PicoCTF 2022 computer security competition. I scored 12,000 points (top 3.2%) during the competition as a solo player and placed 248th.

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HackTheBox CyberSanta 2021 CTF Writeup

Write-ups for various challenges from the 2021 HackTheBox 2021 Christmas CTF. Solved all web, crypto, and forensics puzzles.

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HackTheBox Machine Writeups

Write-ups and tutorials for various cybersecurity challenges from HackTheBox.

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DocSum

A tool to automatically summarize documents using the BART Machine Learning Model.

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AI Respiratory Doctor

A flask web app template for use with machine learning projects. Currently contains complete example code to run a fully functional X-Ray diagnosis AI.

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Education

Cornell University

Bachelor of Science
Computer Science

Info: College of Engineering. Dean’s Honor List. Previous president of the Cornell Cybersecurity Club.

Coursework: Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Functional Programming, Linear Algebra, Probability and Statistics

Aug 2026

Skills

Languages
  • Python
  • JavaScript/TypeScript
  • Java
  • HTML
  • CSS
  • SQL
  • OCaml
  • C
  • Bash
Machine Learning
  • PyTorch
  • transformers (GPT)
  • scikit-learn
  • NumPy
  • Lightning
  • pandas
  • OpenCV
  • Spacy
Web
  • React
  • Next.js
  • Tailwind CSS
  • FastAPI
  • Flask
  • React Native (Expo)
  • Bootstrap
  • web scraping
DB and DevOps
  • PostgreSQL
  • Docker
  • Supabase
  • Azure
  • AWS
  • MongoDB
  • MySQL
  • Firebase
  • CI/CD
  • Git