Elfege Arthur Leylavergne

AI Infrastructure & Agent Tooling — Engineering Productivity

Built to accelerate my own Mindhop work — coordinating multiple Claude Code instances across the codebase, retaining cross-session context, and offloading repetitive engineering tasks.

• Anamnesis: vector-based episodic memory (FastAPI + MongoDB Atlas Local $vectorSearch, HNSW 1024-dim) shared across 20+ concurrent Claude Code instances over 4 networked machines via SSH ProxyJump chains.
• Same infrastructure powers a personal job-tracker / Chrome Extension (FastAPI, Claude CLI, RAG, Chrome Debugger Protocol form filling, nightly APScheduler pipeline).

Over Height Vehicle Detection — NYSDOT Production Edge System

Sole architect of a real-time safety system integrating LiDAR, IP cameras, and automated traffic control. Documented for hand-off; non-engineer field staff perform installs from the runbook.

• Fault-isolated multi-process architecture (5 processors + Flask app) in single Docker container with 7-layer watchdog; 120+ days continuous uptime in field deployment.
• Dual-sensor correlation: LiDAR + VCA cameras with confidence-plateau detection — reduced 18 duplicate detections to 1 optimal output. MQTT/WebSocket distribution to TMC dashboards; AVRO pipeline integration via Apache NiFi.
• Automated field installer handles encryption, hardware integration (LiDAR / PTZ / SNMP), systemd config — non-technical staff run the install.

DMS Control, Device Monitoring & Real-Time Alerts

• Reverse-engineered NTCIP 1203 from MIB specs; built vendor-agnostic driver framework with 31 end-to-end tests — no SDK, no vendor support.
• Network monitoring for UDOT: 2,400 devices, 750+ subnets, 90%+ cycle-time reduction (54 min to 5 min) via asyncio + adaptive batching.
• Real-time alert routing on Apache Flink + Kafka; PostgreSQL stored procedures, modular SMTP/Twilio dispatch.

Technology Integrator (formal role: 2012 – 2016)

• Contributed to the institution's broader technology modernization during this period; on multiple metrics LFNY now outcompetes for-profit Manhattan schools several times its budget.
• Trained faculty (mostly non-technical) on classroom integrations and digital-pedagogy tools — translated technical constraints into vocabulary teachers could act on.
• Year-long teacher mentorship program. Followed individual colleagues across the school year — observed their classes, met regularly, brought situated advice on how to integrate technology into their teaching and how to use tech for their own ongoing development. Not a one-shot workshop: a sustained one-to-one accompaniment matched to each teacher's actual practice.

Robotics Program Director (2015 – 2022) — Middle & High School

Pedagogical choice: deliberately non-competition-oriented. The standard high-school robotics circuit (FIRST, VEX) rewards remote-controlled cars styled as robots; we built genuinely autonomous systems — sensors, decisions, closed-loop control. The work is harder, the wins are slower, the learning is real. I refused the easy path and the program is in its 10th year.

• Founded the program from scratch — designed curriculum, sourced and budgeted hardware, recruited middle-school and high-school students.
• Taught C++ firmware development, sensor integration, and closed-loop control to students with no prior programming exposure — same craft, two age groups, two adapted teaching registers.
• Hands-on hardware: motor encoders, PID, ultrasonic / IR / IMU sensors, custom PCBs — students shipped working autonomous robots by end of year.

Faculty & Polysophia Research Collective (2007 – 2022)

Teaching approach. Demanding and accessible at the same time — high methodological rigor anchored in concrete examples drawn from students' everyday lives. The job is to bring abstract ideas within reach of the student in front of you, not to lower the ceiling. I was headhunted directly from public examination of my pedagogy materials and stayed for 15 years. Department head Dr. Isabelle Milkoff (Head of French & Philosophy, LFNY) wrote in 2021 that "one of the most remarkable skills of Mr. Leylavergne is the limpidity and eloquence of his explanations as well as the relevance of the examples he finds in students' everyday life in order to support them in their access to the world of abstract ideas," and described "a very powerful relationship of trust between the students and their professor."

• Scale and stakes. Trained roughly 100 students per year from A to Z toward the baccalauréat — full responsibility for content and methodology, compressed into a single academic year per cohort.
• Differentiated pedagogy and equity practice. LFNY is mandated by its statutes to host ~15% scholarship students, and the 450-school AEFE worldwide network brings children of diplomatic and expatriate families from African and European countries — many of whom cannot access the kind of private tutoring sometimes presumed for the institution's population. I held weekly heures de dialogue — three hours of open one-on-one office time that functioned as free supplementary tutoring for any student who needed it. Refused paid private tutoring on principle: every student would either be in my class that year or end up in my class in Terminale (Y12), and a fee gate on supplementary work was incompatible with that responsibility.
• Spring-break revision sessions — founded as unpaid volunteer work. I started the first baccalauréat-cohort spring-break revision sessions on my own time, off the clock, simply because students needed the runway. The institution observed it, found it useful, and eventually formalized the program school-wide. The colleagues who took issue with that formalization (because it implied the labor expectation extended to them) is itself a small lesson in how institutional baselines actually move.
• Methodology toolkit (own work, refined across 18 cohorts). Started in the French public lycées and continued through the LFNY years — each year tightened the materials I gave to the next: structural templates for the dissertation and explication de texte, year-by-year worked corrigés on official Bac sujets, and a 39-entry Dictionnaire axiomatique et catégoriel — a Kantian/Wittgensteinian discipline for constructing rigorous philosophical starting points. The "axiomatique-critique" method (my own term) was born directly out of my doctoral research; the toolkit is what brought it into the classroom. By the later years it was the canonical reference students used during the year and during exams.
• Summer was research time. Every summer went into philosophical research and into building the next round of teaching tools — methodology documents, online materials, dictionary entries, prep for the upcoming Polysophia projects and Epistemology Club visits. Teaching during the year and research during the summer fed each other; neither would be what it is without the other.
• Hand-coded digital pedagogy from 2005 onward — built a dynamic pedagogical site (HTML / JavaScript / CSS, RSS, video) when most teachers were avoiding the web entirely; this pre-dated and produced the LFNY headhunt, and underpinned the later Tech Integrator role.
• Polysophia (2009 – 2022) — co-founded with David Soquet; cross-disciplinary student-led research under professional scientific supervision. Partners: Prof. Chiappori (Columbia, economics), Pr. Casanova (Rockefeller, immunology), Dr. Ozon (genomics).
• Epistemology Club + invited speakers. Founded an Epistemology Club connecting Philosophy, Mathematics, and Science departments. Speakers included Prof. Chiappori (Columbia) on three visits teaching micro/macroeconomics directly to students; Étienne Klein on two visits on the foundations of physics; Alexandre Zabi (CERN / CMS) on quantum mechanics in 2017; and Derek Muller (Veritasium) in 2015.
• Manon Garcia visit (Nuit de la Philosophie). Brought philosopher Manon Garcia to LFNY; ten of my advanced philosophy students studied her book On ne naît pas soumise, on le devient in advance and held a sustained discussion with her.
• Student-led conferences. Organized student participation in the French Embassy's Night of Philosophy (Brooklyn Public Library); my LFNY student Lorenza Wolzka de la Torre presented her Polysophia article Hegel's Big Mistake.
• TED-Ed bilingual club (2014) — co-led an LFNY chapter; covered on the TED blog. Ph.D. thesis published: Une Critique Hégélienne de Hegel (PAF, Paris, 2014; ISBN 978-989-20-3141-5).