Hello,

I'm Sam Packer

Machine Learning, Software & Data Engineering

I'm an engineer at Duke, working on an M.Eng. in Artificial Intelligence. I've been writing software since 2013, starting with websites for nonprofits and Arduino projects, and these days most of my work is data and machine learning systems.

Right now I'm a Software Engineering Intern at Unlimited.ai, where I spend most of my time in Databricks building data pipelines. I'm also the CTO of Guided, an ed-tech startup, and a Research Fellow in the Duke Applied AI Cyber Lab, where I build models that catch encrypted VPN traffic slipping past school web filters. Before that, I built a distributed reporting system for a credit union, risk-based authentication for Shibboleth, and a reinforcement learning agent that pulls a Boeing 737 out of a stall.

Outside of work and school, I try to stay away from screens. I like hiking, and I take a lot of photos of the places I travel to, plus more of Duke Gardens than I can count. I also collect vinyl, and I take my listening setup more seriously than I probably should. And yes, this website runs on servers I manage myself.

Experience

My latest projects

mise

Type how you feel in one sentence and mise sets the scene: palette, light, typeface, and ten works across art, film, music, poetry, and books.

Dreamliner

A DreamerV3 agent that recovers a Boeing 737-300 from stalls and upsets. As far as the literature shows, the first time a world-model approach has been used for stall recovery.

Sentinel
Demo

A defense stock claim analyzer that scrapes tweets, filters bots, and labels claims as exaggerated, accurate, or understated by comparing them against actual price movements.

Latest from my blog

We Built a Solution to Gen Z's Loneliness Crisis at a Hackathon

Two-thirds of college students feel lonely. At Duke's AI Hackathon, we built Sync AI to change that.

Building Risk-Based Authentication for Shibboleth in Two Weeks

You log into Canvas, your email, and your university portal every day without thinking twice. But the security protecting those logins? It's nowhere near as sophisticated as it should be. So my team and I decided to modernize it.

Tracing the Currents: From Flows to Data Centers

A data storytelling project exploring whether America's growing network of data centers is truly straining the power grid, or if the story in the numbers points to something more complex.