About me.

My name is Nik Belle and I'm currently pursuing a Master's in Computer Engineering at UC Santa Barbara. While my education is specialized in machine learning and software systems, I have a general passion for developing technology that improves our lives in ways that we haven't yet imagined.

Education

M.S. Electrical and Computer Engineering

University of California, Santa Barbara

2025 – Exp. 2026

B.S. Computer Engineering

University of California, Santa Barbara

2021 – 2025

Experience

Machine Learning Research Assistant

NLP Group - UC Santa Barbara

Winter 2025 – Present

R&D Machine Learning and Software Engineer Intern

Quantum Energy Company

Fall 2024 – Present

Software Engineer Intern

Pacific Life

Summer 2024

Machine Learning Research Assistant

Rothman Lab - UC Santa Barbara

Spring 2024

Foresight Research Intern

Carbon Project Inc.

Summer 2023

Honors and Awards

Harold Frank Scholarship

UC Santa Barbara

2025

Honors Scholar

UC Santa Barbara College of Engineering Honors Program

2025

Dean's Honors

UC Santa Barbara College of Engineering

2021 – 2025

Eagle Scout

Boy Scouts of America

2021

Publications

ArXiv Paper

Agents of Change: Self-Evolving LLM Agents for Strategic Planning

Agents of Change: Self-Evolving LLM Agents for Strategic Planning

Nikolas Belle, Dakota Barnes, Alfonso Amayuelas, Ivan Bercovich, Xin Eric Wang, William Wang

Preprint - Research on LLM agents that can self-improve their strategic planning abilities through autonomous prompt and code rewriting using multi-agent collaboration in board game environments.

Recent Work

GauchoSat (Senior Capstone)

Nanosatellite for collecting real-time peformance data on next-gen solar cells.

Multilingual LLM Bias Evaluation Framework

Uncovers how political bias in multilingual LLMs varies across both models and languages, revealing challenges in bias detection and mitigation across linguistic contexts.

Encrypted Video Classifier

Trained a neural network to fingerprint streamed Youtube videos using only public, flow-level network data.

Fault Tolerant Distributed LLM Service

Platform that coordinates distributed LLM querying using Multi-Paxos.

Mountain Bike Trail Grade Monitor

Real-time trail grade monitor that uses Kalman filtering and exponential smoothing to provide mountain bikers accurate incline tracking over rugged terrain.

Smart Aperture Control System

Built a responsive temperature regulator by interfacing STM32 microcontroller with various peripherals.

Features

UCSB CE Spotlight

UCSB Computer Engineering Spotlight

Featured in UCSB CE Student Spotlight

Highlighted by UC Santa Barbara's Computer Engineering department for academic achievements and innovative project work in machine learning and software systems.