​Friday Hacks #292

​​Friday Hacks, by NUS Hackers, is a weekly event where invited speakers share their technical experiences and interests! In this week's session, we have:

​Talk 1 (7pm): From ARKit to AI Video: Building a Cinematic Tool on iOS

​What does it take to go from idea to award-winning app in a weekend? In this talk, Varick walks through how he built StoryWorld — an AR film director app for iOS that lets anyone place 3D characters, compose cinematic shots with their phone camera, and generate AI-stylized images and video. He'll cover the full creative and technical stack: ARKit, RealityKit, Hyper3D Rodin, Fal.ai, and OpenAI Codex — and share how he used MCP servers and custom skills to move fast. Whether you're into AI coding, generative media, or just want to know how to ship something impressive under pressure, this talk is for you.

​Speaker Profile

​Varick is a Founding Software Engineer at Voltade and a content creator. He builds full-stack and iOS apps at the intersection of AI and creative tools, and documents the process as a creator online. His AI short film screened at Gently Film Fest. Most recently, he built StoryWorld, which won first place at OpenAI Codex hackathon.

​Talk 2 (8pm): Toward Reliable Database Systems at Scale

​Ensuring the reliability of database systems is essential yet challenging, given their increasing size and complexity. In this talk, Manuel will present past and ongoing efforts to address correctness issues in database systems using automated testing techniques, which have allowed finding more than 800 unique bugs in mature and widely used database systems. He will cover how they tackled the test oracle problem by constructing mechanisms to validate query results, and their ongoing work to apply these techniques at large scale.

​Speaker Profile

​Manuel Rigger is an Assistant Professor at the School of Computing, National University of Singapore, where he leads the Trustworthy Engineering of Software Technologies (TEST) Lab. His research focuses on improving important software systems, in particular, the reliability aspects of data-centric systems, in which he and his lab have found more than 1,000 unique, previously unknown bugs. Before joining NUS, Manuel was a postdoc at ETH Zurich, mentored by Zhendong Su. He completed his PhD at Johannes Kepler University Linz, mentored by Hanspeter Mossenboeck.

​See you there!