Joshua Hegstad

Computer Science @ Columbia University

Full-stack engineer building AI and AR products.

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Projects

Standard Partners Fund Projects

Investor Goggles (AR market insights) and Debt Vulture (bankruptcy monitoring), built in partnership with Standard Partners Fund LP.

Next.jsTypeScriptSupabaseLLMsAR

NLP Hallucination Mitigation

Teaching small language models to know what they don't know. Distilled reasoning from a 235B parameter teacher, trained the model to abstain on questions it would get wrong, then used reinforcement learning to tune the confidence threshold. 97.5% precision on detecting knowledge boundaries.

PythonPyTorchQwenRL
NASA SUITS

NASA SUITS

Co-led Columbia's team developing AR astronaut guidance system. Scaled software team 2x to 20 engineers. Implemented Agile workflows, secured funding via NASA & NY Space Grant proposals. Successfully tested at Johnson Space Center with NASA engineers.

UnityC#HoloLens 2Snap Spectacles
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More Projects

Polley

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Josh-OS

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Puriphico

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ArcaTracker

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Don't Fret!

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Experience

Columbia University
Columbia University·Research Assistant
Jun 2025 - Present

Developing AI research tools

Pure Poker
Pure Poker·Early Software Engineer
May - Aug 2025

Payments, private games, AI avatars

AMLAH (Columbia Build Lab)
AMLAH (Columbia Build Lab)·Software Engineer Intern
Jan - May 2025

Full-stack platform development

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Standard Partners Fund LP·Software Engineer Contractor
Dec 2024 - Present

Investor Goggles, Debt Vulture

Hess Corporation
Hess Corporation·Cybersecurity Intern
May - Aug 2024

LLM tools, vulnerability analysis

Columbia
Columbia University·BS Computer Science, Applied Math Minor·2023 - 2026

C.P. Davis Scholar | National Merit Scholar