a résumé, but make it rhyme

Oh, the Things
Arlen Built!

written & engineered by Arlen Frederick Kumar
Berkeley, CA · updated June 2026

turn the page · tap a balloon to pop it
the big idea

The next great big buyer? It isn't a Who.
It's an agent that browses and buys things for you.

It compares and it picks, it decides and it pays —
while the humans have wandered away from their days of clicks.

But the web was built old, for the eyes and the thumbs,
so the brands get filtered before the deal comes.

So I build the translator — fresh, structured, and true —
so the old web can talk to the buyers brand-new.

where I showed up · 1

Co-Founder & CTO, Wrodium

2024 → now · Berkeley SkyDeck Batch 21 · 🏆 Most Innovative Technology

I co-built a company — GEO's the kind —
keeping knowledge fresh and brands top-of-mind.

where I showed up · 2

Researcher, Hearst Lab · UC Berkeley

2024 → now · advised by Prof. Marti Hearst · NLP & IR

In a lab full of language, with Hearst at the helm,
I measure how robots make sense of the realm.

where I showed up · 3

Founder, Air Quake Simulations

acquired · VR flight-sim hardware · founded at 19 ✈️

At nineteen I built, in a workshop of mine,
an F-18 cockpit — and it flew just fine.

the school part

B.A. CS, Data Science & Economics

UC Berkeley · Spring 2026 🎓

Computer Science, Data, and Econ — a fine three —
at Berkeley in spring twenty-six, that'll be me.

on the mic

“The Ad-ification of AI: When Chatbots Become Salespeople”

CITRIS · UC Berkeley · Feb 2026 🎤

On ads inside chatbots — the trust we might lose —
and the rules being drawn for the AI we use.

things I know how to do

Thing 1, Thing 2… Thing 8

From Python to proofs, from fresh crawls to schema —
here's the whole truffula toolkit-arena.

Languages

Python · TypeScript/JS · Lean 4 · SQL · Bash

Knowledge Freshness

Recrawl scheduling, change detection, staleness scoring, AI-bot crawl analytics, citation drift across ChatGPT/Gemini/Perplexity/Claude

Retrieval & Vectors

pgvector, HNSW, IVF-Flat, hybrid dense+BM25, cross-encoder re-ranking, nDCG/MRR/recall@k

LLM Systems & RAG

Production RAG, agentic tool use, MCP + the WebMCP spec, eval harnesses, grounding & citation enforcement

Semantic Web

schema.org / JSON-LD, Wikidata disambiguation (Q138634126), knowledge-graph construction

GEO Measurement

Conversion Potential Score, Revenue-Weighted GEO, Prompt-to-Revenue Velocity, cross-platform attribution

ML & Research

PyTorch, Hugging Face, benchmark design (GEO-16, CHASE), formal methods, econometrics

Operations

YC SAFEs, cap tables, Apollo + Instantly outbound, fundraising, Notion data rooms, hiring

And the moral, dear reader, is simple and clear:
the future needs builders — and one of them's here.

So… let's build a few more.

Pick up the phone, drop a line, say hello —

★ co-founder & CTO of Wrodium · co-founder & CEO is Leanid Palkhouski ★