Nickolas Chua

Renaissance Engineering Programme Scholar @ NTU

Nickolas Chua
01 — About

Year 1 Computer Science student at NTU's Renaissance Engineering Programme (B.Eng + M.Sc. in Technology Management, minor in Mathematics).

I like building systems where data meets decisions. Currently implementing a research paper on combinatorial arbitrage in prediction markets — using LLM-powered semantic comparison to detect mispricings across 8,000+ Polymarket contracts, with a full pipeline from TimescaleDB ingestion to Kelly-sized order execution.

Interested in quantitative systems, applied ML, and backend engineering. I enjoy taking things from research papers to production.

When I'm not debugging pipelines, I'm 20 meters underwater — I work part-time as an assistant dive instructor in Singapore.

02 — Skills
LanguagesPython · TypeScript · C#
ML & DataPyTorch · Pandas · Scikit-Learn
ToolsGit · LangChain · PostgreSQL · Next.js
CertificationsML with Python (FreeCodeCamp) · Data Analysis (FreeCodeCamp) · Foundational C# (Microsoft) · Computer Vision (Kaggle) · Feature Engineering (Kaggle)
03 — Projects
04 — Experience
Dec 2025 – Jan 2026

Software Engineering Intern

Tech Incubator at Queens College, New York

Shipped RentAShelf.co, a live full-stack marketplace connecting store owners with brands.

  • ·Shipped live marketplace handling real transactions within 6-week internship
  • ·Processed multi-party payments via custom Stripe Connect pipeline
May 2025 – Dec 2025

BRAIN Research Consultant

WorldQuant

Developed systematic trading alphas on the BRAIN platform across global equity markets.

05 — Hackathons
Feb 2026

NUS CMS Maritime Hackathon 2026 — 1st Runner-Up

Smart Fleet Selection

Built Smart Fleet Selection system using MILP optimization for bunker fuel transport from Singapore to Australia.

  • ·Developed robust min-max MILP resilient to carbon price and safety regulation changes
  • ·Optimized 22-vessel fleet achieving $20.8M/month cost with 10% lower emissions
Feb 2026

BeyondBinary Hackathon — Best First Year's Award

SenseAI

Built accessibility-first communication platform bridging deaf, blind, deafblind, and mute users through real-time AI.

  • ·Real-time ASL detection using MediaPipe + LSTM with 12 sign vocabulary
  • ·Integrated Hume AI for emotional tone analysis with braille output support
Feb 2026

Hack4Good 2026 — Finalist

MINDSConnect

Built solution for social good challenge, advancing to finals.

Jan 2026

NUS Hack&Roll 2026

Rabak

Built Rabak, a Singlish speech analysis tool that tracks your "lah", "lor", and "walao" with AI speaker recognition.

  • ·Implemented speaker diarization with pyannote for multi-person conversations
  • ·Built custom Singlish detection pipeline on top of MERaLiON ASR
Oct 2025

SingHacks 2025 — 2nd Runner-Up

TripMate

Engineered TripMate in 48 hours, automating travel quotes under 2 minutes via TesseractOCR and Groq.

  • ·Reduced travel quote time from 15+ minutes to under 2 minutes
  • ·Built voice-enabled RAG pipeline with OpenAI Whisper and ElevenLabs
Oct 2025

NTU CEIT x Baringa Trading Competition — Champion

LNG Trading Model

Developed an LNG trading optimization model combining forward curves, ARIMA-GARCH forecasting, and Monte Carlo simulation.

  • ·Won 1st place against 20+ teams with trading model
  • ·Combined ARIMA-GARCH forecasting with Monte Carlo risk simulation
Oct 2025

GovTech AI CTF 2025 — Top 15

Competed in AI-focused capture the flag competition using machine learning and adversarial techniques.

Aug 2025

TikTok TechJam 2025

BERTBERT

Developed BERTBERT, a multi-tower deep learning model processing 100K+ reviews with 20 metadata inputs.

  • ·Achieved classification accuracy surpassing GPT-4o on 100K+ reviews
  • ·Designed cross-attention architecture handling 40:1 class imbalance
Aug 2025

NTU x Base Hackathon — 2nd Runner-Up

WellnessBuddy

Developed fitness tracker using Virtuals Protocol Python SDK and Agent Commerce Protocol.

  • ·Won 2nd Runner-Up with on-chain fitness tracking dApp
  • ·Integrated Virtuals Protocol for hierarchical AI agent architecture
Jun 2025

WorldQuant IQC 2025 — Top 1%

Placed in the top 1% among 80,000 participants in global alpha research competition.

06 — Education
Aug 2025 – Present

Renaissance Engineering Programme Scholar

Nanyang Technological University

Bachelor of Engineering Science (Computer Science) with minor in Mathematics, Master of Science in Technology Management.

07 — Contact

Open to Summer 2026 internships in software engineering, ML, or quant roles. Let's connect.