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About Me
Me
I'm Robby Hoover, a PhD student in Information Technology at the University of Cincinnati. I also did my MS here (thesis track, 2025) and my BS in IT with a minor in music (cum laude, 2023). I'm a first-generation student, and UC has been home for the entirety of my academic career.
Research
My research is in applied AI, mostly computer vision. I currently work across three labs at UC: the Applied Machine Learning and Intelligence Lab, where I focus on healthcare imaging diagnostics; the Ohio Bat Lab, where we're building a system to identify individual bats from collagen and elastin patterns in their wings as a non-invasive alternative to banding; and the Civic Technologies Lab, which connects researchers across disciplines.
Bat wing segmentation
So far I've published two papers at IEEE ICCMI 5 — one on noise-robust bone fracture detection in medical imaging, and one using U-Net segmentation on bat wings for individual identification. I served as a peer reviewer for IJCAI-25 and IEEE ICCMI conferences, and took first place at the 2025 UC IT Expo Research Symposium.
Outside the labs, I TA across game design, game development, and HCI courses in the School of IT — game dev is also where I spend my own tinkering hours, working primarily in Godot as a committed user of the open-source Godot + Blender toolchain. I also recently spent a summer doing research computing work on UC's HPC cluster, deploying open-source LLMs and experimenting with multilingual transcription via Whisper for foreign-language film captioning.
Currently, I am working on my dissertation, focusing on the use, trust and clinical efficacy of Explainable AI in Healthcare Imaging Diagnostics. My current research direction involves a large literature review, a series of interviews and surveys with clinicians, and finally a technical interrogation of current foundation models and XAI methods when applied to the needs of healthcare practioners.
Music
Lamerak, live debut
Music is the other half of what I do, and I release under a few different names:
Lamerak — a solo dungeon synth project blending medieval, orchestral, and synthesized sounds. Notable releases include the hour-long A Journey Into the Feywild (2023) and several contributions to the Shades of Dark Ambient series of releases by Umbra Vulgaris Records, including Vol. 6, a benefit compilation for Gaza relief. Songs for the Loveland Frogman also attained moderate local acclaim. I made my live debut at the Cincinnati area's first regional dungeon synth showcase, sharing a bill with Hedge Wizard, Haudh, Mons, and Magic Mishap for a 200+ person audience.
OSHA Violation — electronic music stretching across all flavors of ambient. My first full-length, Lost Futures, came out in January 2025. An earlier track was selected to fly aboard Blue Origin's New Shepherd rocket in 2021.
Ossification — a black metal duo I co-founded with a longtime collaborator. Our debut album Gathered in the Ancient Woodlands released through Liminal Dread Productions in 2023.
I also take on commission work. Most recently, I composed music as Lamerak for The Underlands, an upcoming sandbox campaign setting expansion for the Land of Eem TTRPG — a Kickstarter-funded fantasy roleplaying game published by Exalted Funeral. I've also scored short films and indie games for various collaborators.