name: Stephen Sookra
role: Software Engineer Intern @ XR Dojo
education: Kennesaw State University · CS · AI/ML Concentration · 3.8 GPA · '28
latest: $5,000 Overall Grand Prize · IBM SkillsBuild Sports Challenges (VARSITY)
building: Attest · Erasure-Proof · GravitonKV · ATL Quest
learning: Trustworthy AI · C2PA Provenance · LLM Inference on Arm · Agentic Systems
mentors: Aaron Butler · Henry
mission: Founding a company in trustworthy AI for high-stakes domains
location: Atlanta, GA (UTC-5)
contact: stephensookra@gmail.com · stephensookra.com- Latest win VARSITY took the $5,000 Overall Grand Prize across the May + June IBM SkillsBuild Sports Challenges, plus Most Innovative in June out of 98 teams
- Just shipped AccessGate (caption + audio-description conformance pre-check on IBM Granite · IBM Bob AI Builders Challenge) and Renova (offline, on-device Medicaid renewal assistant on Gemma · web + iOS · five states)
- In judging Rooted (Backblaze) · CornerCheck (Slack Agent Builder) · Silent-Drift Sentinel (DataHub) · COGNISECT (OpenAI Build Week)
- Now building Attest, a phone agent that refuses to guess (Call-E) · Erasure-Proof, provable crypto-erasure for agent memory (CockroachDB x AWS) · GravitonKV, KV-cache quantization on Graviton4 (Arm Create 2026) · ATL Quest (AR + XR @ XR Dojo)
- Summer 2026 taught web + game dev as a SMASH Academy TA (Morehouse / Spelman)
- Ask me about hackathons · AR/XR · AI/ML · founding · Atlanta tech scene
Hackathon record · 🏆 $5,000 Grand Prize @ IBM SkillsBuild · 💡 Most Innovative @ IBM SkillsBuild June · 🥇 1st of 22 @ Actian Build Challenge · 🥇 1st @ HMI 2026 · 🥈 2nd of 4,700+ @ Wells Fargo / GCA · 🥈 2nd + 🥉 3rd @ KSU Social Good · 🥉 3rd @ KSU FinTech · 🥉 3rd @ Vibra ATL
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🏆 VARSITY Grand Prize + Most Innovative · IBM SkillsBuild Real-time, screen-reader-native AI that explains VAR and offside calls to blind football fans, grounded in the IFAB laws. Python · IBM Granite · RAG · a11y |
🥇 StepSafe 1st · HMI 2026 Computer-vision diabetic foot ulcer triage from a single photo: expert-level assessment for any clinician. TensorFlow · MobileNetV2 · FastAPI · React |
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🥈🥉 PyroLens 2nd + 3rd · KSU Social Good AI prescribed-burn decision support fusing IoT sensors, weather, and satellite data for safer controlled burns. Python · scikit-learn · ESP32 · Supabase |
🌱 Rooted Backblaze · 7 live surfaces Vendor-neutral C2PA soft-binding resolution server on Backblaze B2: recovers stripped provenance for AI image, audio, and video. FastAPI · C2PA · TrustMark · Postgres · Next.js |
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🎬 AccessGate IBM Bob AI Builders Caption + audio-description conformance pre-check for film: 23 cited rules with a gated generative fix on IBM Granite. Python · IBM watsonx · React · a11y |
📋 Renova Build with Gemma Offline, on-device Medicaid renewal assistant: reads a renewal notice and returns the deadline, case number, and documents in plain English. Five states. Gemma · ONNX Runtime Web · PWA · iOS |
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📉 Silent-Drift Sentinel DataHub Agent Hackathon On-call agent that detects silent model drift, walks DataHub ML lineage to the upstream cause, and writes the causation back to the catalog. Python · DataHub SDK · AWS · Vercel |
⚡ GravitonKV Arm Create 2026 KV-cache quantization tradeoff study for LLM inference on AWS Graviton4, with a reproducible harness and a canonical results schema. llama.cpp · KleidiAI · Graviton4 · arm64 CI |
More on DevPost · stephensookra.com
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Credit: Inspired by @tylinndd · originally adapted from @1010nishant
Built by Stephen Sookra · Atlanta, GA · shipping ambitious things
Last edited: August 2026
Built by Stephen Sookra · Atlanta, GA · shipping ambitious things
Last edited: August 2026