Omkar Govil-Nair

Huddle Count

Huddle Count is a secure location sharing app to simplify attendance on school field trips, using biometrics for identity and liveness checks as well as on-device keys for end-to-end encryption (powered by Myst Auth). Started building Huddle Count to help improve the attendance process on my high school robotics competition trips.

Project Website

Myst Auth

Myst Auth allows developers to easily add customizable passkey authentication to their apps. Passkeys are a relatively new standard allowing users to authenticate using their device's biometrics or hardware security keys, using asymmetric cryptography to significantly reduce the possibility of phishing attacks while providing a smooth user experience. Myst Auth provides an API and Login Portal which can be added to any web app with just a few lines of code. With Myst Auth, I am expanding on my experiences with cryptography and web security to better secure my own apps and help others transition to the passwordless future.

Project Website

Project Github

The Purple Standard

As part of my school's robotics team, I helped develop The Purple Standard (TPS), a unified, community-driven standard data format for 'scouting' data which teams use to assess the performance of each robot in order to make strategic decisions. The goal of TPS is to promote more collaborative data collection and analysis by enabling every team to collect data in a common format for easy sharing. I helped ideate the initial release and am focused on writing our documentation and working closely with other teams to help them adopt the standard.

Press Release

Project Github

Myst News

Myst News aims to make news headlines more factual and informative by using Large Language Models (LLMs) to summarize articles from many news sources collectively. I started Myst News to provide a more convenient way to understand what happened for each news story while reducing speculation and subjective perspectives of news events. For this project, I am learning how to build and train LLMs, and am currently fine-tuning several open sources summarization models (Bart, Flan-T5). I am also gaining experience with setting up GPU compute servers for AI training and use.

Project Website

Medium Post

Myst Chat

Myst Chat is an accountless, web-based, and end-to-end encrypted private chat application. As I developed my interest in cybersecurity, privacy, and cryptography, I witnessed the rise in popularity of encrypted messaging apps, but I found very few that were web-based (for cross-platform accessibility) and accountless (for better anonymity and convenience), so I built Myst Chat to expand my knowledge of encryption and make my communications more private. While building Myst Chat, I learned how to implement encryption in JS and Python, how to enable strong hashing in Python, and how to secure API endpoints.

Project Website

Project Github

The Purple Warehouse

As a member of my school's robotics team, I worked with the App Dev subteam on the development and rollout of The Purple Warehouse (TPW), a data collection and analysis application for other teams participating in First Robotics Competitions, helping our team win a spot at the 2023 World Championships. I developed the data analysis, visualization, and game prediction scripts which inform teams' strategy decisions. I also helped lead TPW's marketing and outreach by creating email lists, pitching to teams at competitions, organizing meetups for users, and reaching out to organizations for potential partnerships. In 6 weeks we had 120 teams registered, across 7 countries and 30 states.

Project Website

Project Github

Youweb Incubator

I had the incredible opportunity to work with the Youweb Incubator's impact-focused Cohort IV group to explore and develop applications to incentivize more sustainable consumer spending. As part of my internship, I learned how to conduct user surveys, build web apps, and build browser extensions. While the application has not been launched publicly, I gained a lot of experience working with investors, Entrepreneurs-in-Residence, and founders in using technology to drive societal change.

Incubator Website

O Watch

Ever since I first learned to program Arduino projects when I was 6, I realized how much better Arduino is for teaching coding and STEM compared to commercially available kits which often used block pseudocode (like MIT's Scratch). Around that time, smartwatches were becoming popular, so I decided to make a programmable smartwatch kit to teach real coding to kids my age. Launching a Kickstarter campaign to fund O Watch, I raised $18,000, surpassing the project's goal. By partnering with TinyCircuits, who developed and manufactured the electronics, and 3D printing the watch cases, I was able to ship out all of the kits, engaging hundreds of kids in learning STEM. I shared my journey building O Watch multiple years at Maker Faire Bay Area and on my blog IoT4Kids, and I hosted workshops at corporate campuses, makerspaces, and the Computer History Museum to introduce Arduino, O Watch, and 3D printing to kids in person. Throughout the process, I learned more about 3D design, PCB manufacturing, marketing, teaching, business, and entrepreneurship.

Project Website

Kickstarter Page

IoT4Kids

In my journey of learning coding and electronics, I updated my progress through my blog, aiming to help others who were interested in similar projects. On the blog I shared projects all the way from starting out with making an LED blink to an internet connected score display for the World Cup and later documenting my process building O Watch.

Blog Website