Cole Van Hersett
3D Tree Reconstruction
A computer-vision pipeline that turns a 20-second phone video of a tree into a measurable 3D branch map — built because I climb and fell the real thing.
Stanford CS 131 final project
Software & Sawdust
Cole Van Hersett
I write software and take down trees; only one of them has an undo button.
About me
I'm Cole — a computer science student at Stanford and a working arborist in the Pacific Northwest. Half my week goes into computer vision, reinforcement learning, and full-stack projects. The other half goes into ropes, saws, and taking trees down safely.
The two halves overlap more than you'd think: my favorite project so far is a vision pipeline that measures a tree's branch structure from a phone video — built because I spend real days deciding where those branches should fall.
what I'm looking for next (and one story worth telling).
The software half
Computer vision, reinforcement learning, systems, and the occasional ray tracer. Course projects with full write-ups, cloud training runs, and deployed code.
The sawdust half
Tree removal and hands-on work — the trade that keeps me outside and pays for the compute. Photos and stories from real jobs.
Featured projects
Action-Token Pruning for Robot RL
From-scratch PPO on MetaWorld, testing whether a learned critic can prune low-value action tokens while fine-tuning robot policies.
Stanford CS 224R final project
Black Hole Ray Tracer
A tiny C++/SDL2 renderer that bends light around a black hole with a hand-written RK4 integrator, live in an interactive window.
Weekend build