Leo Szeto
I find the order inside complex systems. - and build what's never existed before.
Engineer & technical creative. I build the control systems that make extraordinary physical machines behave - turning noisy, high-stakes problems into something ordered, safe, and new.
Big Science · Nusano · 2019–now
Bending particles toward a cure.
I lead control systems and electrical engineering at Nusano, building a particle accelerator that industrializes medical radioisotope production - helping supply the fight against cancer. Physics made precise, safe, and repeatable.
Themed Entertainment · Walt Disney Imagineering · 2012–2016
Making the magic move - safely, on cue.
On the opening team at Shanghai Disneyland, I led the ride-control software for the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train - a best-in-class show out front, safety-critical engineering underneath, keeping every guest safe on every ride.
Open Project Space · UCLA · 2010–2011
Igniting the creative potential of everyone.
Back at UCLA, I started Open Project Space to make hands-on engineering something anyone could walk into - one spark spreading into a whole community of builders.
Selected works
The things behind the story.
Every project I've designed and built, plus the occasional retrospective - filter by Imagineering, Leadership, Hardware, Software, Creative, or Writing, or switch to the timeline to see how the work unfolded year by year. (The career chapters above jump straight to their slice.)
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Writing
fig.01500 Days of Chess: A Retrospective
Two years after a booth at Holiday at the Park sent me home with a $40 chess game for my daughter, I hit a 500-day Duolingo streak. Here's what chess taught me along the way.
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Software
fig.02
Free Audio Tours
A free, self-guided, multi-language GPS audio tour platform I built as a PWA on Cloudflare Pages - no account, no app, works offline, and speaks your language. It started with a river water taxi tour in Chicago.
2026 PWA Cloudflare Pages Geolocation
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Software
fig.03
Pokémon Typing
A Pokémon-themed 3D typing game I designed and shipped to production for my daughter after the commercial apps lost her attention - taken from concept to a self-hosted web app with AI as the primary build tool, and instrumented so a dashboard turns her practice into learning insights.
2026 TypeScript Three.js Vite
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Software
fig.04This Site, By the Numbers
A meta case study - this very portfolio is built and maintained by an autonomous AI-agent pipeline, and this page charts the receipts. The hook is 97× cost leverage: $110.73 of API spend produced an estimated $10,778 of human-equivalent labour.
2026 Claude Code Gitea Cronicle
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Software
fig.05
Obsidian Gitea Cards
My first open-source contribution to the Obsidian community - a plugin that renders live, auto-refreshing Gitea issue cards inline in your notes and lets you file issues without leaving the editor.
2026 TypeScript Obsidian Plugin Gitea
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Software
fig.06
News Aggregator
A self-hosted daily news digest I built - it pulls headlines from left, center, and right sources, has Claude synthesise them into a balanced summary, and publishes it as a static site with audio narration, photo carousels, and daily podcasts. Live at digest.leoszeto.com.
2026 Python Claude API RSS
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Nusano
fig.07
Fast Beam Interlocks on an Event-Based Timing System
An IPAC'26 paper from my control-systems work at Nusano, built on a concept I originated - consolidating fast beam-interlock (machine protection) logic directly into an event-based timing system, so the existing fiber timing network carries interlock data alongside device triggers.
2026 Particle Accelerator Control Systems Machine Protection
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Creative
fig.08
Wave–Particle Duality
A synthesizer album inspired by my travels. I picked up synths during COVID-19 lockdown, and it culminated in this record - the sounds and sights of everywhere I went in 2023, with over 80,000 km of air travel behind it.
2023 Synthstrom Deluge Sound Design Music Production
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Leadership
fig.09
Open Project Space 2.0
The nationwide evolution of the hands-on engineering program I founded at UCLA - OPS 2.0 brings IEEE at UCLA's project-based hardware curriculum to student engineering chapters across the country.
2020 Engineering Education Hardware IEEE
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Leadership
fig.10
IEEE Rising Stars Keynote
My first time on the IEEE Rising Stars stage - a double-keynote with my friend Jonathan Chew on machine learning, its implications, and what engineers should do to meet the challenges of the coming decade.
2020 Public Speaking Machine Learning Leadership
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Creative
fig.11
Housewarming Museum Guide
To celebrate buying our first house in 2017, Michelle and I turned it into a museum - a self-guided audio tour with numbered stops, narrators, and guest interviews, the way you'd walk a gallery with a handset to your ear.
2017 Jekyll GitHub Pages HTML5 Audio
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Leadership
fig.12
Secrets to Being a World-Changer
A two-part leadership e-book I was invited by IEEE-USA to write with my good friend Jonathan Chew - distilling what we'd learned as Disney Imagineers into a framework for leading change, the "being" in Part 1 and the "doing" in Part 2.
2017 Authorship Leadership Public Speaking
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Imagineering
fig.13
Shanghai Disneyland
As a Ride Controls Software Engineer, I designed and built the control software for the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, a family-oriented roller coaster at Shanghai Disneyland. It tracks over 1,500 components to keep every vehicle safely under control.
2016 Ride Control Systems PLC Safety-Critical Software
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Creative
fig.14Board Game Design
Math + creativity = fun. I study game design and have developed two board games, balancing mechanics, math, and playtesting into something genuinely fun.
2015 Game Design Prototyping
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Imagineering
fig.15
Mini Coaster
A miniature but fully functional roller coaster I built for the WDI Open House. It runs on a PLC with real block-zoning logic that catches dangerous situations like a valleying train and drives the system to a safe state.
2015 PLC Block-Zone Logic Reed Switches
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Creative
fig.16
Cycling
Cycling is how I chase an active lifestyle on two wheels - it gets me outdoors and keeps me moving between projects.
2014 Cycling
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Software
fig.17
SPAx Website
I built the website for IEEE-USA's Student Professional Awareness (SPAx) program, giving its student professional-experience events and resources a home online.
2014 Web Development IEEE-USA
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Hardware
fig.18
Project Atlas
I designed Project Atlas as a modular Natcar and an educational platform - an analog front end, a full-featured BLDC motor controller, a power board, and a microcontroller board, split so other students can extend and redesign each piece.
2012 Embedded Systems BLDC Motor Control Analog Front End
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Hardware
fig.19
3× Lithium Polymer Charger
I designed a finger-sized, low-cost charger that tops up three lithium-polymer batteries at once for about $2.50 each - built to support UCLA IEEE's OPS program instead of paying $10 for a single charger.
2012 PCB Design Power Electronics Battery Charging
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Hardware
fig.20
Project Synchron
Project Synchron is the software framework behind my modular Natcar work - a Natcar automation platform that ties together signal sensing, control logic, and motor drive.
2012 Automation Control Systems Embedded Software
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Imagineering
fig.21
WDI Intern Christmas Popup
A holiday popup I led for the interns in our company green space at Imagineering - from the initial concept and space design through rallying people to help build it.
2012 Ideation Spatial Design Organization
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Hardware
fig.22
Christmas Light Equalizer
I built a sound-driven light interface that pulses Christmas lights in time with music - a simple, festive take on an audio equalizer.
2011 Embedded Systems Audio Processing
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Software
fig.23
ToneMatrix Clone
I built a sequential music generator, a clone of the classic ToneMatrix that turns a grid of toggled cells into looping melodies.
2011 JavaScript Audio Generative Music
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Hardware
fig.24
SkyTanX
I built a telepresence robot you drive over Skype - call the robot for its live video/audio feed, then steer it with typed commands or a vision-based virtual joystick. No client-side setup beyond Skype.
2011 Python Skype API Image Processing
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Creative
fig.25
Paco Truck
Drummer in Paco Truck, a blues-rock band of fellow engineering students. We played the Engineering Talent Show and a string of local bars and venues, covering The Black Keys and Led Zeppelin alongside our own originals.
2010 Drums Live Performance
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Leadership
fig.26
Open Project Space 1.0
Open Project Space 1.0 is the year-long, hands-on electronics program I created at UCLA IEEE, backed by a wiki of projects, hardware references, and how-to guides for student members.
2010 Engineering Education Hardware IEEE
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Hardware
fig.27
Pomegranate
I built Pomegranate, a compact 80 mm × 80 mm micromouse with every component for precise movement mounted on a single PCB - including a Bluetooth port and a 6-DOF inertial measurement unit.
2010 Embedded C PCB Design Bluetooth
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Hardware
fig.28
Hally the Line Follower
Hally was my first foray into robotics - a path-following robot my team at Skyline College built from the Society of Robots "$50 Robot", presented at an undergraduate research symposium at Stanford.
2009 Microcontrollers Sensors Actuators
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Hardware
fig.29
Johnny 5
Johnny 5 was the robot our team designed and built for the 2009 US FIRST Robotics Competition.
2009 Robotics FIRST Robotics
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Creative
fig.30
Photography
Photography is a hobby I picked up in 2009 with a used Nikon D200 handed down from my dad, a fellow Nikon shooter - a way to capture moments in my life.
2009 Nikon DSLR Photography
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Software
fig.31
Project Canine
A 2009 summer research project (NSF / Auburn University) where I derived a working dog's motions from noisy sensor data with a machine learner and GUI - built around Major, a Labrador Retriever wearing a remote sensing and comms package.
2009 Machine Learning GUI Sensor Fusion
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Hardware
fig.32
CMouse
I built CMouse, a dynamic maze-solving micromouse that navigates and maps an unknown maze on the fly.
2008 Embedded Systems Maze Solving Robotics
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Software
fig.33
CSim Simulator
I built a GUI for visualizing maze-solving algorithms - step through it to watch different strategies explore an unknown maze and converge on a solution in real time.
2008 GUI Algorithms Visualization
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Software
fig.34
VisRoute
I built a GUI for visualizing logistics algorithms - it lays out routing decisions graphically so you can inspect each algorithm's choices step by step.
2008 GUI Algorithms Logistics
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Software
fig.35
Project Survival
A top-down shooter I built as a hobby game-development project, working out movement, enemy waves, and shooting mechanics.
2007 Game Development Unity
- Nusano
- Imagineering
- Leadership
- Hardware
- Software
- Creative
- Writing
Timeline of the work, newest to oldest - click a node to open a project or article.
Let's build something
I'm always happy to talk about control systems, engineering, or a new idea worth making real. Reach out through any of the channels below.
Notes ↗ (opens in a new tab)
Thinking out loud - a living garden of notes on systems, learning, and building in public.