About

me

I’m a 5th-year CS PhD student at Stanford (G5). I work on deep learning, and how we can enable new capabilities (performing new tasks, learning from new data types) in our models.

this site

A friend of mine once had a Russian piano teacher…

Just kidding. But to anyone who’s seen a previous version of this site, this is about the third or fourth iteration of a corner of the web I’ve tried to carve out for myself. Hoping this time’s a charm.

Built with love, Hugo, and the Tale theme.

the purpose

Mix of an academic and online presence. Place to motivate thoughts on life, school, and side projects. Excuse to build silly things like this.

contacting me

“mzhang at cs dot stanford dot edu”

more things

# Education

2020 - 2025(?): Stanford PhD in Computer Science
2016 - 2020: Harvard AB in Statistics and Computer Science
2012 - 2016: Conestoga High School

# Current Activities

Research

## Topics I currently work on

Foundation models. Self-improving systems. Task automation. Jarvis.

## Topics that also inform the above

Long and efficient sequnce modeling.

Robustness to distribution shifts, hidden stratification, spurious correlations

## Topics I wish I had more time to think about

Distributed learning (esp. federated learning); personalization and robustness in meta-learning; multi-agent systems

# Past Activities

2020: Deep Learning Intern - NVIDIA
2017, ‘18, ‘19, ‘20: Teaching Fellow - Stat 110
2017, ‘18, ‘19, ‘20: Trying to dance - post-AADT Eastbound 2019
2019: Organizer - Hack Lodge Bay Area S’19
2019: Organizer - Harvard Summercamp Bay Area 2019
2018: Case Team Leader - HCCG
2018: Partner - Black Diamond Capital
2018: Quant Research - DRW
2017: ML + Genomics - Broad Institute
2017: Risk Mgmt - Transamerica
2017: Data Science - StratoDem
2016: Software - Boston Children’s Hospital
2015: CRISPR - Church Lab, Harvard Medical School