Summon Gebrelibanos
Chicago, IL  ·  Northwestern University  ·  Computer Engineering & AI

I build things people
keep using — around the world.

I study Computer Engineering and AI at Northwestern. I sit with a problem long enough to understand it, then pick the tools that fit — software, AI, research, sometimes hardware.

The work ends up somewhere real: an app, a classroom, a community organization, a field site.

Currently
Running CleanTube, researching behavior change at Delta Lab, and studying at Northwestern.
See selected work Résumé ↗
CleanTube is used in 185+ countries
3.3M+
CleanTube downloads
650K+
Monthly active users
130M+
Backend requests / month
$500K+
Humanitarian aid processed
Selected work

Different problems and different technologies, but the same pattern: understand what people need, build something real, and stay with it long enough for it to matter.

01 / Product
CleanTube app icon

A distraction-free Android video app, built and run alone

Four years of it — app, backend, listing, and business, with no one else on the team.

CleanTube · Kotlin · Node.js · Flask · Google Cloud Services · 2022 — Present
4.2 ★
Across 40K reviews
300%
Organic growth, year over year
185+
Countries with users
~60%
Fewer crashes after the native rewrite
The system I built and run
Android app
Kotlin, native rewrite
→↓
API layer
Node.js
→↓
Services
Flask
→↓
Infrastructure
Google Cloud Services
The product

I wanted to watch video without an interface built to keep me watching. The first version shipped as React Native, and people found it on their own — no paid marketing then or since.

Rebuilding the app

I rebuilt it natively in Kotlin once React Native became difficult to keep reliable at that scale. Crashes fell about 60%, and the app started behaving like part of Android instead of a layer on top of it.

Infrastructure

Cost per request is the constraint that shapes the backend. The app is independent, so the infrastructure has to stay cheap enough for it to stay that way.

Operating it

Four years in, most of the job is upkeep: reviews, Android version churn, and turning down features that would make the app feel like the thing it replaced.

02 / Community

Six years of infrastructure for a community organization

The association had been tracking donations by hand, so I built the system behind the process.

Tigrayan Community Assoc. of Kentucky · Director of Technology (volunteer) · 2020 — Present
$500K+
Humanitarian aid processed through systems I built and maintain
6 years
Running the organization's technology, still on call

The donation site and the accounting platform behind it have handled more than $500,000 in humanitarian aid. I also built the annual census that keeps membership data current, and I manage the rest of the organization's technology — infrastructure, equipment, and technical updates at board meetings.

Money moving through software for people I know raises the cost of getting it wrong. It is why I care about systems that keep working after whoever built them moves on.

The system I built and still maintain
Donation site
Donations
→↓
Payments
Payment processing
→↓
Accounting platform
Aid tracking
→↓
Board reporting
Plus annual census
Tigrayan Community Association of Kentucky website
03 / Education + AI

A learning platform for 190+ underrepresented students in Ethiopia

The organization had no platform to teach on, so I built the one it runs on.

Enlighten Academy · EnlightenHMLA · Lead software engineer · Google Cloud · Cloudflare Workers · 2025 — Present
The need

EnlightenHMLA teaches test prep, programming, English, and U.S. college applications, and had no platform to run any of it on.

What I built

The website, a responsive enrollment system, and an AI-powered learning tool built on LLM and text-to-speech APIs.

The constraint I designed around
Students
190+ enrolled
→↓
Cloudflare Workers
Routing · rate limiting
→↓
LLM + TTS APIs
On Google Cloud

Rate limiting sits between the students and the paid APIs, so a class arriving at once cannot turn into a bill the organization can't pay.

Enlighten Academy platform
04 / Research + Hardware

Prototypes, physical systems, and research

Hardware, embedded software, and research prototypes, built to be used outside the lab.

Northwestern · MIT MITES · KYSEF · 2023 — 2026
Northwestern · May — June 2026

Bio-inspired fiddler crab robot

A robotic claw that replicates the mating wave of a male fiddler crab, used on-field in Thailand for an international science and wildlife media production.

Developed in collaboration with Northwestern's Department of Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics. I worked with researchers to translate observed crab behavior into engineering requirements, then led the hardware selection, embedded software, motion planning, CAD, prototyping, and system integration myself.

Python tools I wrote handled real-time motion tuning and data capture, which is how the wave got adjusted between takes rather than between builds.

What it's made of
Arduino Nano
Embedded control
→↓
Custom 3D-printed parts
CAD and prototyping
→↓
Python motion tuning
Real time, between takes
→↓
Field test
Thailand
The mechanism I designed
Arduino Nano
Motion sequencing
→↓
Servo control
Two axes
→↓
2-DOF claw
Servo-actuated
→↓
Wave motion path
The mating wave, replicated
Delta Lab, Northwestern · 2025 →

Behavior-change research

Behavioral science and human-computer interaction work on helping people overcome personal fears. I analyze data to identify behavioral triggers and prototype tools that interrupt negative patterns in real time.

KYSEF · 2023 — 2024

Steganographic QR communication

QR codes embedded inside ordinary-looking photographs. Built in Python, CoreML, and SwiftUI; I trained models to keep codes detectable through compression and noise while preserving image quality.

Research awards from
U.S. Air Force
U.S. Navy
GE
05 / Startup engineering

Joining small teams and building the first version of the product

Two early-stage companies, end to end: a real-time AI support app, and a trend engine for creators.

AlwaysThere · Crowdlisten · 2025 — 2026
AlwaysThere · Founding engineer

A real-time AI support app, concept to investor demo in three weeks

React Native, PostgreSQL, WebSockets, RAG, multimodal models, and neural TTS. The first version answered in about two seconds, long enough to break the feeling of a conversation; getting it to 300 milliseconds was most of the engineering.

2s → 300ms
Response latency
Crowdlisten · Software engineer

Telling creators what to make next, before the trend peaks

I built the ingestion pipelines that pull social data through external APIs, and the retrieval and ranking on top of them. Ranking on trend velocity and audience sentiment is what separated a timely topic from one already past.

600+
Early users shipped to
Experience
2022 — Now Founder & Engineer, CleanTube Android, backend, business
2025 — Now Student Researcher, Delta Lab (DTR), Northwestern Behavioral science and HCI
2025 — Now Lead Software Engineer, EnlightenHMLA Volunteer
2020 — Now Director of Technology, Tigrayan Community Assoc. of Kentucky Volunteer
2026 Software Engineer, Crowdlisten Ingestion, retrieval, ranking
2025 — 2026 Founding Engineer, AlwaysThere Inc. Real-time AI support app
2026 President, JEB, Northwestern NSBE Led a team of 10
2023 Summer Student, MIT MITES Robotics; paper on ML and robot ethics
2021 — 2023 Volunteer, Omna Tigray Web development for humanitarian advocacy
2021 — 2023 Founder, S & G Web Design Sites for small businesses, Louisville KY
Full résumé ↗
About

I'm a Computer Engineering and AI student at Northwestern who enjoys building technology people can actually use.

I move between software, AI, human-computer interaction, and physical systems, and I like projects that pull in more than one of them. Understanding the problem comes first; the technology is a consequence of it.

I'm most interested in work where engineering decisions and product decisions are the same decision, and where there are real users on the other end of them.

Currently exploring
Behavior change and human-computer interaction
Latency as a product feature in AI interfaces
Software that touches hardware
Organic growth without a marketing budget
Chicago, IL · Northwestern University, B.S. 2029 · English, Tigrinya, some Spanish