Welcome to my homepage! I’m a 4th year CS PhD student at Rice University, advised by Prof. Ankit Patel.

My research focuses on building and improving machine learning and deep learning models for science problems in an explainable way. The fields of subjects involve quantum many-body physics, computational chemical sensing, medicine, etc. To be more specific, I build models that do not require too much domain knowledge but are able to learn and exploit various types of data in different fields of Science. I aim to increase the interpretability of these models while maintaining the same level of performance. Recently I found that sometimes it is possible to achieve the goal without neural networks - just use neural-networks inspired procedures and learn from their success.

I received my Master’s degree from University of Pennsylvania, where I studied Data Science and worked with Prof. Shivani Agarwal on Learning the Tree Structure of a Nested Logit Choice Model from Data. I also worked for Prof. Barry Silverman on Addressing Disparities in Healthcare Access and Outcomes among Chronically Ill Older Adults: Assessing the Feasibility of an Agent-Based Modeling Approach (visualization of the geographic data used in the project). I received my Bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua University, where I studied Industrial Engineering.

Out of all my hobbies, I’m proudest of my efforts in music composition. I was a bassoon and saxophone player in Tsinghua University Symphonic Band and hence I had the opportunity to write pieces for different sizes of bands, from woodwind duets, saxophone quartets, woodwind quintets, to the full band. In my last year as an undergrad, I rearranged the La La Land Suite and it was performed on our annual concert (video). In my spare time, I also play tennis, video games, and go hiking. My favorite singer is Kotoha.