About Tim Hourihan

Photo of Tim Hourihan

I'm a Research Programmer at Boston Fusion, where I integrate and adapt machine learning models for computer vision applications in national defense. I work with architectures like transformers and joint embedding predictive architectures (JEPAs), modifying them to meet our specific needs.

Before joining Boston Fusion, I graduated from the University of Rhode Island in 2024 with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and a minor in Data Science, earning a 3.99 GPA. While in school, I worked as a Software Developer at OMNI Digital Services, building full-stack websites and internal tools with JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL. I also completed a Software Development Co-op at FM Global, contributing to a large-scale internal web application using React and C#.

Outside of work, I’ve contributed to a range of academic and personal projects involving machine learning, software development, and game design. Some of my favorites include a deepfake detection system using EfficientNet and FasterViT that placed first in a machine learning course competition and a sentiment analysis visualization built during HackMIT, where my team earned third place in the MIT-IBM Watson AI Track. I’ve also published several games on itch.io using Unity and Godot.

I truly enjoy solving challenging technical problems and I'm always interested in learning more and growing as a developer in this field.

Tim Hourihan's Work

Jan 2025 - Present

Boston Fusion - Associate Research Programmer

  • Implementing and optimizing machine learning algorithms with applications to national defense.

June 2024 - Jan 2025

OMNI Digital Services - Software Engineer

  • Introduced GitHub version control and a CI/CD pipeline for automatic deployment to a remote server with FTPS, significantly improving code management and deployment efficiency for the company.
  • Utilized Python scripts to automate several redundant operations relevant to the job
  • Created a zip-code-qualifier tool that leverages OpenAI's GPT API to discover cable/satellite providers offering services for specific zip codes the user enters

January 2024 - June 2024

FM Global - Software Development Co-op

  • Worked on a large full-stack internal application, the Digital Client Experience Location Risk InSite platform, performing in an agile scrum environment with other developers using React, TypeScript, GraphQL, Hasura, C#, and SQL.
  • Created scalable APIs for a GraphQL layer of the application leveraging .NET, DTOs, EFCore, FluentValidation and AutoMapper.

May 2022 - January 2024

Omni Digital Services - Junior Software Engineer

  • Developed a “Project Starter” web application that streamlined the creation of frontend, backend, and database architecture for any web project.
  • Constructed several full-stack websites for local businesses with jQuery, PHP, MySQL.
  • Created a custom web-based inventory management system for a traffic distribution company, automating the building of complex PDFs for BOMs and POs for 400+ vendors, 700+ customers, and 1700+ parts. Used PHP, FPDF, and RESTful APIs.

June 2020 - September 2020

PrepareRI - Research and Development Intern

  • Collaborated with a team of 25 to prototype a wearable device and mobile application for PURVIS Systems that allowed US military personnel to identify pre-symptomatic COVID-19 cases, and achieved first place in the event out of 20 teams.

Tim Hourihan's Projects

Deepfake Detection App

September 2023 - December 2023

Trained EfficientNet and FasterViT models to classify deepfake images, achieving an accuracy of 90%. Integrated EfficientNet with Grad-CAM to display the most active tensors of the image and created a Gradio interface. Scored first place in the project out of 14 teams of undergraduate and graduate machine learning students.

HackMIT “Medisum” App

September 2023

Developed a scalable web app that displays 50+ hospitals in the Greater Boston region with scores based on the sentiment analysis of their reviews and provides a summary of those reviews on an interactive map. Built a backend service using FastAPI and the Yelp Fusion API. Leveraged Hugging Face's BART Large CNN model to generate summarized reviews and IBM Watson's sentiment analysis to analyze emotions in text. Finished in third place at HackMIT in the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab Challenge focused on combining AI and the Physical World.

University of Rhode Island Web App

October 2023 - December 2023

Prototyped a character creation tool that analyzes young students’ perceptions of scientists by collaborating with the Computer Science and Education departments at URI. The project was funded by the NSF (National Science Foundation).

Rust Image Compression Tool

March 2024 - April 2024

Worked with a partner to implement a lightweight version of JPEG in Rust based on specifications by programming a CLI tool for Portable Pixmap (PPM) image compression and decompression. Employed floating-point quantization, discrete cosine transformation, and bit packing for a binary reduction size of 67%.

Game Development Projects

Various Dates

Developed multiple games for game jams on itch.io using Unity (C#) and Godot (GDScript).

Contact Tim Hourihan

Feel free to get in touch with me, I look forward to meeting you soon.