Bobby Yan

Education

• GPA: 4.00/4.00
• B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS)

• Advanced Science Program (ASP) Class
• International Baccalaureate Diploma

Experience

RISE Lab, UC Berkeley

• Building systems for machine learning—data management, model debugging, experiment reproducibility, and model explainability with Rolando Garcia, advised by Prof. Joe Hellerstein and Prof. Joseph Gonzalez.

College of Engineering, UC Berkeley

• Head TA for CS 162: Operating Systems, TA for CS 188: Artificial Intelligence
• Taught weekly discussion sections of ~35 students, held weekly office hours, homework and project parties.
• Led exam reviews. Wrote and graded exams for upper-division classes.
• Contributed and reviewed course contents, including lecture notes, homework, projects, and exams.
• Improved course infrastructures and revamped the course website for CS 188.
• Average teaching rating of 6.32/7.00, 0.55 above the department average.

Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab, UC Berkeley

• Research in deep reinforcement learning, working on safe RL, efficient policy optimization with safety constraints with Ashwin Balakrishna and Brijen Thananjeyan, advised by Prof. Ken Goldberg.
• Developed methods to improve the scalability and stability of model-based RL algorithms based on model predictive control

Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab, UC Berkeley

• Applied domain randomization techniques to train robust domain-invariant object recognition and robot grasping models for surface declustering tasks, by increasing simulated variability to improve the generalizability to the real-world

CS 61A, UC Berkeley

• Answered conceptual questions, guided students through problems and debugging during weekly office hours, labs, and project parties.

TEDxACSindependent

• Technology Lead for TEDxACSindependent.
• Built and maintained the official website, working closely with the marketing and design teams.

Center of Micro/Nano-electronics Lab (NOVITAS), NTU, Singapore

• Studied nano-wettability and the spreading dynamics of Newtonian fluids, tested and analyzed ~25 solid surfaces and nano-fluids with surfactants under Prof. Changqing Sun
• Finalist and "Best in Electrical and Electronic Engineering" at Nanyang Research Symposium.

Publications

Rolando Garcia, Eric Liu, Vikram Sreekanti, Bobby Yan, Anusha Dandamudi, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Joseph M. Hellerstein, Koushik Sen. VLDB 2021.

Honors & Awards

Top 10% academic performance in College of Engineering for all semesters

Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow at RISE Lab, UC Berkeley

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Honor Society

National Engineering Honor Society | Top eighth of Engineering students at UC Berkeley

Highest scholastic records obtainable by freshman at UC Berkeley | 4.0 GPA with 20 units

Finalist and "Best in Electrical and Electronic Engineering", NTU (Singapore)

Top 10% in Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry

International Shanghai TI-Cup Mathematics Contest

Top Student in Class of 2014, ACS (Independent)

Projects

• A record-replay system for efficient hindsight logging in model training

• Class website for CS 188: Artificial Intelligence.

• A deep RL agent that plays Gomoku (a.k.a. Five in a Row) through random and self plays.

• Placed in the top 2% of 300+ teams in NP-Hard constrained graph partitioning contest using a combination of METIS multilevel k-way partitioning scheme, greedy vertex swaps, local search, and simulated annealing.

• Built a voice-controlled electric car and implemented closed-loop control system to reduce disturbance and error in car movements. Employed signal filtering, PCA and K-means clustering to distinguish voice commands and determine the spoken words.

• A fast and versatile QR Code Generator.

• An addictive and beautiful-looking (gorgeous on the iPhone X OLED display) arcade game with tilt-free gameplay, a nice BGM, and cool sound effects.

• A language-learning-oriented social networking app built using Swift 3 and Firebase.

• Over 25,000 views per month.
• Compilation of notes and guides for high school students to study and prepare for IB exams.

• A practical and highly effective app for learning new Spanish words, with over 15k downloads and more than 1,000 active users.

• Official website for TEDx events organized at ACS (Independent), Singapore.

Contact Info

Skills

Programming

Expert: • Python • Java

Proficient: • C/C++ • Go • SQL • JavaScript • HTML/CSS • Swift

Familiar: • Shell Scripting • Lisp • Assembly (x86, RISC-V)

Technologies

Git • Unix • Node.js • AWS • PostgreSQL • MongoDB • numpy/scipy • TensorFlow • PyTorch • pandas • sklearn • Matlab • Spark • Docker • Firebase • Shell • Xcode • Bootstrap •

Prizes

• 1st Place (out of 830+ teams)

• 1st Place (out of 630+ teams)

• 2nd Place (out of 670+ teams)

• Honor Roll of Distinction – 2016
• Honor Roll of Distinction – 2015

• High Distinction – 2015

• Silver Medal – 2015

• Honor – 2016
• Distinction – 2015

• Distinction – 2014

• Distinction – 2014

• Gold award – 2015
• Gold award – 2014

• Honor Roll of Distinction – 2014
• Distinction – 2013

• Gold medal – 2013