Adam Kamel

University of Waterloo logoSoftware Engineering· University of Waterloo

Hi, I'm Adam, a software engineering student in my second year at Waterloo. I like to split my time between building applied AI systems, and working on ML research. Right now I'm co-leading a robotics RL project with Wat.AI, and also trying to teach an agent to play Minecraft. I'm always open to new projects, collaborations and good conversations!

Experience
b(x) Theory logo

AI Engineer @ b(x) Theory

May 2026 - Aug 2026

Built the document intelligence and financial RAG platform behind a restructuring analytics product

  • Replaced a paid parsing service with an open-source pipeline, saving $25K with $350K projected at scale
  • Built a financial RAG system on a PostgreSQL vector store, retrieving evidence across 250K+ documents
  • Shipped real-time distress alerts from filings and 20 insolvency trustees, saving analysts 5-10 hours weekly
  • Built a survival model predicting one-year insolvency risk for public companies with 80% accuracy
Wat.AI logo

Technical Project Manager @ Wat.AIDesign Team

May 2026 - Present

Leading WorldFold, a project exploring world models and reinforcement learning for robotic cloth manipulation

  • Co-leading 8 ML researchers and engineers building world-model RL control for a dual-arm cloth-folding robot
  • Overseeing a custom MuJoCo cloth simulator integrating SO-101 robot arms with deformable cloth physics
  • Guiding development of a Dreamer-style world model that predicts how cloth responds to each robot action
WatStreet logo

Machine Learning Engineer @ WatStreetDesign Team

Dec 2025 - Aug 2026

Trained statistical and deep learning classifiers to identify market regimes in noisy financial time series

  • Applied statistical and deep-learning models to identify market conditions across 16 years of financial data
  • Expanded the training dataset with a rolling evaluation, improving accuracy from 42% to 86%
  • Designed HMM state and transition modeling to capture regime persistence and shifts without labeled data
Workbench logo

Software Engineering Intern @ Workbench

May 2025 - Sep 2025

Developed AI agent integrations and improved natural language processing systems

  • Improved natural-language endpoint routing accuracy by 28% with multi-step vector search over text embeddings
  • Developed FastAPI integrations for 30+ external services
  • Wrote Pytest cases covering 200+ integrated service endpoints
Papers

Emergent World Beliefs: Exploring Transformers in Stochastic Games

Adam Kamel et al. · NeurIPS 2025 MechInterp Workshop · EMNLP 2025 BlackboxNLP Workshop

Explores whether transformers build internal world models of games they can't fully observe. Generated 3M+ simulated poker games to train a GPT-2-style model on hand data, then probed its internal activations, recovering hand strength with 98% accuracy and showing the model encodes its own win probability (r = 0.59), information it was never shown during training.

RSCE: Training-Free Residual Stream Encoding for Persistent Context Amortization

Adam Kamel, Eric Xu · KnowFM Workshop @ ACL 2026

A training-free method that compresses long documents into reusable vector representations. Benchmarked against leading compression baselines on QA and code tasks across 7B–70B models, RSCE retains 60–81% of answer quality while using 99% fewer tokens, and the paper identifies why quality drops when it does.

Featured Projects
Image

Minecraft RL Combat Agent

Self-play RL agent that beats 99% of human players in Minecraft sword duels

C++PyTorchJavaReinforcement Learning
Pufferfish

Pufferfish

Chess engine that placed 3rd overall out of 75 teams at ChessHacks

PythonPytorchHuggingface