About Me
I am a Master’s student in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at UC San Diego and proudly a first-generation college student. I am very grateful to be advised by Professor Sicun Gao. My general research interests are in safe reinforcement learning and combinatorial optimization.
Research Publications
- Policy Optimization with Advantage Regularization for Long-Term Fairness in Decision Systems [ paper ] [ poster ] [ code ]
Eric Yang Yu*, Zhizhen Qin, Min Kyung Lee, and Sicun Gao
NeurIPS (Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems) 2022
Education
UC San Diego- M.S. in Computer Science, Advisor: Prof. Sicun Gao (09/2022 - 03/2024)
- B.S. in Computer Science (09/2018 - 06/2022)
Experience
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (06/2023 - 09/2023)- Research Intern, MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
- Investigated better zero-order optimization approaches for constrained combinatorial search in vehicle routing problems
- Cambridge, MA
MIT Lincoln Laboratory (06/2023 - 09/2023)- Research Intern, Group 001 - Artificial Intelligence Technology
- Developed novel zero-shot image classification method for improved out-of-distribution generalization in vision-language models (paper in review)
- Lexington, MA
Amazon (06/2022 - 09/2022)- Software Dev Engineer Intern, Amazon Incentive Machine
- Designed and created scalable machine learning automation solutions that will annually save Amazon >\$12MM and drive >\$1 billion in value
- Seattle, WA
- Amazon (06/2021 - 09/2021)
- Software Dev Engineer Intern, Amazon Payment Products
- Implemented a highly scalable, strictly low-latency internal lookup service that will handle billions of requests per month
- Seattle, WA
UCSD (01/2019 - Present)- Teaching Assistant, Computer Science and Engineering Department
- Handled everything involved with running courses, except teaching the courses themselves (full list here)
- La Jolla, CA
Microsoft (01/2019 - 06/2022)- Student Ambassador, Gold (highest tier)
- Hosted technical computer science workshops and pedagogy talks for people around the world
- Represented the US and North America in several large-scale global events
Software
- DeMAC [ code ]: lightweight framework for decentralized multi-agent coordination
- PPO for Beginners [ code ] [ article ]: pytorch tutorial for Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO)
Passion Projects
I work closely with a local San Diego middle school to bring STEM to low-income and historically disadvantaged communities. Having grown up in a low-income household with no ties to industry or academia, I found myself overwhelmed coming into college. Folks around me were coming in with high school internships, years of coding experience, parent mentors in big tech/positions of power, etc., all of which I didn’t have access to. However, I am blessed to have found mentors in college that really changed my life. They showed me ropes that I didn’t know existed, took risks on me that I didn’t think I deserved, and taught me what kind of person I wanted to become. These were the people that helped me grow and convinced me that yes, I belong here. Seeing how big an impact my mentors made on my life, I wish to do the same for others, especially those who can relate with my struggles. By giving back to the community, I aim to inspire and help others like how my mentors did for me. Our industry collaborations have included folks from Microsoft, Qualcomm, F5, Instagram, TikTok, and more. Here are some photos of past events:
Activity/Talks
- (11/2022) Presented at poster session for the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2022 in New Orleans, Louisiana
- (10/2022) Presented at poster session for the Institute for Learning-Enabled Optimization at Scale (TILOS) 2022 in La Jolla Shores
- (09/2022 - 06/2023) Mentored 4 undergrads in the UCSD Early Research Scholars Program (ERSP)
- (05/2022) Hosted CodeChella, an escape-room themed STEM competition, for Castle Park Middle School
- (09/2021) Gave talk on leadership for Microsoft summer interns 2021
- (05/2021) Gave talk on machine learning for the Global AI Student Conference 2021
- (05/2021) Hosted machine learning workshop for San Diego State University (SDSU) with HKNxIEEE
- (05/2021) Hosted machine learning workshop for Microsoft Reactor
- (03/2021) Gave talk on machine learning and college readiness for university students in Nepal
- (01/2021) Hosted machine learning workshop for Microsoft ambassador AI/ML League
- (11/2020) Gave invited talk representing North America for Microsoft #SeasonsOfServerless Episode 1
- (07/2020) Hosted AI Gaming Tournament for university in Canada
- (06/2020) Gave invited talk on leadership for Microsoft summer interns 2020
- (11/2019) Hosted cloud-computing and computer vision workshop at UCSD with CSES
- (10/2019) Helped run technical .NET workshop with Sarah Guthals and Scott Hanselman
- (10/2019) Hosted inspire session for Microsoft student ambassadors around the globe
- (09/2019) Student panelist for UCSD CSE Orientation
- (06/2019) Presented at poster session for the UCSD Undergraduate Research Symposium
- (05/2019) Student panelist for UCSD Triton Day 2019 CSE Orientation