Tobi Adesanya

About

I started college at 16 and I've been dragging half-formed ideas into working things ever since.

Affiliations

Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated
ColorStack Fellow
Black Brilliant Minds

First-generation student at USC, studying computer science and business administration. Most recently Core AI at LinkedIn. Before that, a year as an AI research intern at Google and a year and a half as a research fellow at USC.

Most of my work lands somewhere in AI, computer vision, and software. The part I care about most is who gets to do this work at all, so I volunteer with the Viterbi Impact Program teaching STEM around Los Angeles.

Experience

Research

Intelligent motion planning with acceptable contact

Impact

Robotics · vision-language planning · ICRA 2026

Simulation trials: 3,200
Real-world trials: 200

A motion planner for robots working in clutter. Instead of treating every object as something to route around, it decides what is safe to touch. A vision-language model assigns each object a semantic cost, those costs feed an anisotropic cost map encoding how safe a push is from a given direction, and a contact-aware A* search plans over motion primitives to find trajectories that permit the contact worth making.

The human feedback came through a platform I built: a full-stack site that served randomized video pairs for evaluation, with REST APIs and a structured JSON pipeline behind it so every vote survived intact. 65+ people used it, and those results were accepted to an RSS workshop.

Read the paper Project site

Writing

The “AI brain” hack: How I personalized my Copilot
LinkedIn · Aug 2026
A walkthrough of setting up the Copilot CLI so it carries your context between sessions: repo instructions, cross-session memory, and skills you write yourself.

Stack

Languages: Python
C/C++
Java
JavaScript
TypeScript
SQL
R
Bash
Protocol Buffers
HTML/CSS
AI & ML: LLMs
LangChain
LangGraph
RAG
Prompt Engineering
Computer Vision
VLMs
Pydantic
Infrastructure: Apache Kafka
Apache Beam
Apache Flink
Temporal
gRPC
Kubernetes
Docker
PostgreSQL
Firebase
Web & Tooling: React
Next.js
Node.js
Flask
Tailwind CSS
Prisma
pytest
REST APIs
Git
Vercel
CI/CD

Leadership

NSBE National Leadership Institute · Chicago, March 2025

Shadow Initiative Reception

I served on NSBE's National Leadership Institute and led the Dr. Gary S. May Shadow Initiative Networking Reception at the national convention in Chicago. The Shadow Initiative puts student members beside regional and national officers to shadow them through the work, and the reception is where that group meets the professionals and sponsors standing behind it.

1,000+
Attendees

NSBE Region VI · USC, August 2024

Regional Leadership Conference

I was appointed chair with under a month to plan it, then ran three days at USC for the chapter leaders of Region VI. It was the first panel I led and the first workshop I taught. Every speaker came out of a cold email, and most of those went unanswered.

120+
Attendees: 3
Days: 150+
Cold emails