Michael Cronin

Projects

Hackathon builds, research, competition entries, and a few tools I wanted to exist.

Compile

2025

AI news intelligence platform

Ingests 500+ articles a day, clusters them into stories, and builds a personalized feed with semantic search and tone-adjustable rewrites.

Mantis

2025

Visual QA crawler for the web

A crawler that drives a site with Playwright and hands screenshots to a multimodal model to find visual bugs and accessibility issues that DOM-based tools miss.

Hack the North finalist · Best Developer Tool

Chameleon

2025

Content adaptation agent

Turns articles and YouTube videos into platform-native posts for X and LinkedIn. Built in 24 hours; won Best AI Retrieval at HackAI Toronto.

HackAI Toronto · Best AI Retrieval

LLM Jailbreak Defense

2024 – 2025

Mechanistic interpretability research

Steering refusal-related features inside a language model to make it more robust to jailbreak prompts. Co-authored paper published at CUCAI.

Published at CUCAI 2025

Plow Kingston

2025

Snowplow routing simulator

Routes a plow fleet across Kingston's real road network during a live storm simulation. First place in the QEC 2025 programming competition.

Queen's Engineering Competition · First place

MiCRA

2025

Multimodal content repurposing agent

Takes transcripts, articles, video, and audio and produces platform-specific outputs, with a consistency engine that checks generated text against every source.

Scrappers Cup

2025

Tennis ladder manager

Rankings and match tracking for a tennis ladder, with a "poison ladder" system where winners take the loser's rung and a phone-first admin panel.

Crossword Clue Solver

2024

BERT model with a Chrome extension

A clue solver fine-tuned from BERT on 750,000 clue-answer pairs, wired into the NYT Crossword through a Chrome extension for hints without spoilers.

Remote-Controlled Crane

2024

Ontario Engineering Competition

An eight-hour build of a remote-controlled crane that picks up staples with precision, lifts them, and drops them into a bucket, from a fixed kit of materials.

Black Box Controller

2023

System identification and PID design

Identified an unknown plant from sampled outputs alone, then designed a feed-forward and PID controller that exceeded every target spec. Top of the class.