Maia Chess
project 1 , where I get to work withDr. Ashton Anderson
at UofT's Computational Social Science Lab.
K-Scale Labs (YC24)
2, and worked onneural sign language translation
3, developing an open-source ASL fingerspelling and pose-generation model.
Hack Club Scrapyard
, a global high school hackathon in Austin TX and 60+ cities around the world (C$200,000 in funding), and founded
BCYDC
, a community of over 350 high school developers across BC.I try to blog my thoughts, and write takeaways from inspiring resources, in my Knowledgebase
Timeline
August 1, 2025
A Month at CSSLab in Toronto
Spent a month living in Toronto, continuing my work with Dr. Ashton Anderson at the CSSLab. Launched maiachess.com in open beta and began exploring research directions in political polarization, multi-agent debate, and LLMs for long-term well-being and alignment.
June 20, 2025
Graduated High School
Thank you Burnaby South Class of 2025! Coming this fall, I'll be studying Computer Science at the University of Waterloo :)
April 13, 2025
Back to Palo Alto for K-Scale Labs
Headed back to visit Palo Alto—learning about robotics, fundraising and reinforcement learning from designers, researchers, and engineers at K-Scale Labs!
March 15, 2025
Organized Scrapyard Vancouver
My team at the British Columbia Youth Developer Collective brought together 85+ students from around British Columbia to work on cool scrappy projects—and we also broke our previous record for British Columbia's largest youth hackathon!
March 3, 2025
Organized Hack Club Scrapyard Flagship in Austin, TX
We raised C$200,000 and flew in 100 students from around the world to build the scrappiest projects in Austin, TX. In two weeks, on March 15-16, we're running 60+ satellite hackathons in cities around the world! See scrapyard.hackclub.com
February 25, 2025
Visited K-Scale Labs (YC24) in Palo Alto, CA
Spent the week learning at an opensource humanoid robotics startup!
November 16, 2024
Won 1st place at UBC's Ascend Business Case Competition
Worked with classmates to place 1st in the Novice Category at the Ascend Business Case Competition at UBC Sauder, competing against 150 high school students in developing an international expansion plan for Lotte Yukimi Daifuku.
September 30, 2024
Organized yvrHacks—British Columbia's biggest youth hackathon
Led the British Columbia Youth Collective to organize the biggest youth hackathon in British Columbia: 60+ students, $4000+ prizes and 500+ hours of collective hacking! See yvrhacks.ca
September 15, 2024
Attended Hack the North at the University of Waterloo!
Spent the weekend building Sign Engine, a modular sign language processing API to enable real-time sign language translation, which I used to build a Chrome extension for live ASL interpretation of YouTube videos and a website that reads lips and translates into ASL
July 24, 2024
Spent a week on a train hackathon across Canada
Selected among 50 high school students from around the world to board the Hack Club Boreal Express, a 7-day hackathon onboard a train across Canada!
May 25, 2024
Published my work on Sign Language Processing
Gave a talk about my sign language work (An Open-Source American Sign Language Fingerspell Recognition and Semantic Pose Retrieval Interface) to my classmates at Burnaby South, as well as UBC's SLPAA research team. Presented and shared my work through my demo YouTube video, and published my preprint on Cornell University's arXiv!
February 11, 2024
Attended the Hack Club Leaders' Summit in San Francisco
Selected among 50 high school students from around the world to join GitHub Co-founder Tom Preston-Werner for the first ever Hack Club Leaders' Summit!
January 20, 2024
Won nwHacks 2024—my first in-person hackathon
Attended nwHacks—Western Canada's biggest university-level hackathon (around 800 hackers)! I built NutriSnap—a computer vision React Native application that uses your phone camera to scan UPC codes or take photos of your food to track your nutrition.
July 28, 2023
Spent a month at Shad Western University
Selected for Shad at Western University—where I spent a month with 80 other students from across Canada experiencing post-secondary life through lectures, workshops, and a month-long design project.
February 25, 2023
Placed 6th at Math Challengers
Placed 6th individually at Math Challengers @ UBC, a math competition for high school students across British Columbia! Also placed 3rd as a team—qualifying for team provincials.
