Yunho Cho yunho-c

Hi, I'm Yunho 👋

pronounced like you-know!

I am an engineer who is passionate about tackling underserved problems.

XR-Robot-Teleop-Server/Client — a great open-source robot teleoperation software stack.
PoDoFo — an open source, feature-packed PDF app for modern working professionals.
Audiobookify — an open source audiobook generator (TTS) with extremely high quality voices that runs fully on-device.

SightWise – a startup dedicated to building best-in-class assistive technologies for the blind and visually impaired.
Alt Text Wizard – a browser extension that generates alt text in real time using multimodal LLMs.
A bunch of other (hopefully) interesting side projects!

I am a generalist with a diverse set of interests—and love delving into new, unfamiliar sub-fields of engineering all of the time.

That said, my area of expertise (in which I spent enough time to build substantial skillsets) are:

perception, control, and motion planning for robotic systems
training and tuning of large transformer models, and infusing different encoders for multi-modality (e.g., 3D point cloud)
- vision-language models (VLMs)!
inference optimization of machine learning algorithms (for on-device / edge inference)
building software systems in general (web, app, backend/database, CLI tools, and a hint of systems-level programs)

I am always down for a coffee chat! Just leave me a message.

My life goal is to contribute to the world by working on things that deserve—but fail to—catch the attention of the industry.

So far, I have encountered a few important topics that fit into this description in my life:

Access to high-quality knowledge content for non-English speakers
- An unfair amount of academic lectures and articles are strictly available in English.
- We are equipped with powerful machine translation technologies as a society, but these have not been deployed to end-user tools to where people can comfortably translate textbooks, lectures, and assignments to learn in their own language.
Assistive technologies that can enhance the quality of life of individuals with sensory impairments
- The world we live in are not designed with sensory impairment in mind. This includes roads, products, interfaces, even schools and public buildings.
  - Our society presents loads more challenges and safety risks for them, while offering them less opportunity for success (e.g., in schools / jobs).
- We have lots of room for improvement in this end, as a society and as a field (of engineering).
  - A part of this are societal/infrastructural issues, but modern technology has a lot to offer to help with respect to frustrations that commonly arise during activities of daily living (ADLs).
- For example: visual impairment is a lot more common than people realize, and a lot more detrimental than people realize.
  - I am not putting as much time into building visual assistance systems as I did before, but I am going to continue until it is truly considered "solved".
  - Projects like Project Astra are very exciting!

I plan to keep working really hard on stuff like this.

If I can ever build a product with a positive societal impact like the Dot Pad, I will consider my life a big success on my deathbed.