Aidan Schmitigal

A master's capstone project in partnership with the Oregon Department of Transportation, building a discrete-event simulation of rural highway disaster response across Clatsop County's 3,000+ mile road network. The goal is to optimize how ODOT allocates limited equipment and personnel across landslides, floods, wildfires, and snowstorms first through benchmarked heuristic policies and a policy-switching architecture, then through a trained reinforcement learning agent. Read more

Selected through a competitive process to collaborate directly with Civil Engineering researchers at Caltech, building a browser-based 3D analysis tool for visualizing high-rise building behavior during scenario earthquakes. The tool animates full structural simulations in real-time with displacement, velocity, acceleration, interstory drift data and synchronized panels, threshold flagging, and a custom binary data format I designed to make 8GB simulation datasets actually usable in a browser. Read more

A native Java implementation of Proximal Policy Optimization running directly inside a Minecraft server with no Python, no external processes, no overhead. Using JavaCPP to access LibTorch (PyTorch's C++ API) from Java, the training loop runs synchronously with the server tick, sharing memory with the game engine directly. A dream I've had since I was 14, finally built. Read more

A deep learning final project exploring Transformer-based multi-variable weather forecasting across 145 locations in the western United States. I designed and trained two models. First, a focused single-location baseline and a spatially-aware multi-location Transformer. Secondly, using 5 years of hourly data from the Open-Meteo API, trained on OSU's HPC cluster with CUDA. The project is an honest look at what Transformers can and can't yet do for weather prediction. Read more

A year-long senior capstone project developing a CNN-based system to replace traditional Digital Image Correlation (DIC) for analyzing material deformation in Scanning Electron Microscope images. I led the ML development and designed a synthetic data pipeline that transformed 800 seed images into over 1.4 million unique training examples, enabling a U-Net model to produce per-pixel dense displacement fields, a fundamental improvement over DIC's region-based approach. Read more

Flashcard Royale is a web-based auto-battler game developed in 24 hours at a hackathon. Players can import flashcard decks from Quizlet to create unique battling card units. Correctly answering flashcard prompts powers up card attacks in battles against opponents, blending educational content with engaging, strategic gameplay. Read more

Developed a PDF Region Exporter tool that allows users to export specific regions of a PDF document as a separate page. The tool uses the React framework and the TLDraw library to interact with the PDF.js library for PDF parsing and rendering. The TLDraw canvas allows drawing, editing, and adding extra images to the PDF. A custom region-select tool makes it easy to select pages within the PDF. It also uses the Vercel platform for hosting and deployment. Read more

This is a generative art project that explores the intersection of code and 3D modeling by procedurally generating plants in Blender. Utilizing Blender Python scripting and a custom-designed Geometry Nodes system, this project automatically creates an endless variety of unique, visually captivating digital plants, rendered daily and served as dynamic, automated wallpapers via a web API, Cloudflare Workers, and iOS Shortcuts. Read more

Personal data visualization project transforming YouTube watch history into an interactive dashboard. Reveals viewing habits, content patterns, and platform usage through insightful charts and stats. Designed to make interpreting large and complex user data in a visual way that is easy to understand and digest. Built with React and Recharts, and built with Vite to be a single file, it provides a fast and efficient user experience. Read more

Progressive Web App Sudoku game built with SvelteKit, providing offline functionality and app-like installability. Designed to be mobile-first, with a clean and intuitive user interface. Includes a multi-level hint system, a customizable difficulty level, and a built-in timer. Uses local storage for game state and user preferences. And you get confetti when you win! Read more

Created a grocery shopping planner website using vanilla JavaScript and HTML to visualize the store layout and generate optimized shopping lists for efficient grocery shopping. Created a Trader Joe's price planner website with integration of an unofficial API to enable searching for items and price tracking. Includes an LLM-powered grocery shopping planner that generates list suggestions based on meal ideas. Read more

Full-stack web application to simplify Minecraft server setup and management, automating server creation, deployment, and DNS configuration. Includes programmatic Docker container orchestration for scalable and reliable server hosting. Integrates Cloudflare API for seamless DNS configuration. Uses SvelteKit for frontend-to-backend communication, running on Node.js. Read more

Designed and developed the Crafting Comrades website as a shared hub for my high school friends' Minecraft worlds and modpacks. The website uses a database to store mod packs and worlds, and allows users to browse and download them. It also features a live server status of the running Minecraft server and a live map of the world. Read more

SpotifySongDisplay is a personal project that has evolved through multiple iterations, culminating in a polished, macOS-native application that visually enhances the Spotify listening experience. Starting as a basic Python desktop app, it transformed into a system-integrated top-bar display on macOS, showcasing album art, song titles, and dynamic color theming that seamlessly blends with the macOS user interface. Read more

Developed a set of tools for SSH, SCP, and Git integration into Raycast. These tools allow users to easily connect to remote servers, transfer files, and manage Git repositories from the command line. Dynamically loads the user's SSH configuration for connection details and Git SSH accounts. Built a Git tool to set the current Git user config from Raycast and replace old Git user commits with new ones. These tools are designed with safeguards to prevent unintended or unwanted actions. Read more

Explored desktop application development with Tauri and Rust by creating a Bouncing Basketball experiment. Used Rust for programming physics interaction between the balls and the edges of the screen. This playful proof-of-concept was a fun way to learn Rust and Tauri. Read more

This project is a 3D water playground simulation. It uses the Three.js library to render the 3D graphics. The simulation includes a water surface that can be interacted with using the mouse. The water surface is implemented using a shader that simulates water physics. The project is implemented in JavaScript and is available on GitHub. Read more

Personal iOS app designed to provide students with a streamlined and at-a-glance view of their class schedules directly on their iPhones and iPads. Featuring both calendar and lock screen widgets, Simple Timeline offers immediate access to upcoming and current class information, helping students stay aware of their daily schedule and manage time more effectively. Read more