Berkeley, California
Ali Akca
Founder of Nuvella Labs. Computer science at UC Berkeley. I build AI systems and study how to make them safe.
Right now I am building Nuvella, a safety navigation app, as the first product of a company that aims to work on all things safety.
Building Nuvella.
Nuvella Labs is a safety company, and Nuvella is its first app: safety navigation that routes walking and biking trips by recent incidents and street lighting, with live sharing, check-ins and one-tap Escape. It is piloting at UC Berkeley, in Berkeley and in Emeryville.
I designed and built it end to end: the Expo / React Native app for iOS and Android, a FastAPI and PostgreSQL backend, and the routing engine, which draws on live municipal data feeds across dozens of cities.
AI, and keeping it safe.
- 2025 – present
SafeSciBench: an AI-for-science safety benchmark
Co-authored with Mansur Khan. Under review at a Chan Zuckerberg Initiative AI call; revising for NeurIPS.
- Authored a seven-risk-category safety benchmark and evaluated frontier open-weight models against WMDP with the UK AI Safety Institute's Inspect framework.
- Designed a sanitization and de-biasing pipeline that cut dataset target leakage from 99% to 0.6%.
- 2025 – present
Generative AI and authentic writing
Self-directed research, mentored by Dr. D. Petković (SFSU).
- Simulated the brain's writing-learning system in LLMs to produce human-like writing that stays faithful to the prompt.
- Measured reduced homogenization across frontier models with automated LLM evaluation.
- 2024 – 2025
AI Research Scholar, Cambridge Centre for International Research
CCIR STEM Scholarship recipient; mentored by Dr. Robail Yasrab (Oxford).
- Built a domain-specific LLM that turns dense real-estate terms into plain guidance for first-time buyers.
- Assembled a 60K+ example Alpaca dataset and fine-tuned with LoRA and Unsloth on a single consumer GPU.
- 2025
AI Project Developer, Outamation
Via Extern.
- Built OCR and NLP pipelines that sped up loan processing from mortgage documents, and tested RAG pipelines that answered questions with citations.
Where I learn.
UC Berkeley
B.A. Computer Science (CDSS), with an intended simultaneous degree in Business Administration at Haas. Aug 2026 – May 2030.
University of Pennsylvania
Certificate in Artificial Intelligence (ESAP, 2025): the mathematics of machine learning with Prof. Robert Ghrist.
Los Gatos High School
Honor Roll, 2022 – 2026.
Honors
National Merit Commended Scholar · CCIR STEM Scholarship · Japanese National Honor Society · AP Scholar with Distinction
Teams and community.
Turkish Culture Club
Co-founder. Grew the club to 40+ members, organized earthquake relief drives and directed the international delegation.
Volleyball
Varsity athlete with the Mountain View and Bay to Bay clubs. CCS Open Division quarterfinalist and semifinalist, CIF quarterfinalist, AAU Nationals quarterfinalist, All-League Honorable Mention.
Say hello.
Questions about Nuvella, research collaboration, or the pilot in Berkeley.