about

I am a first-year M.Sc student in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). I am currently working on the Dataspread Project led by Prof. Kevin Chang, Prof. Aditya Parameswaran, and Prof. Karrie Karahalios. My research interest lies in building better tools that connect people and data, bridging Database with HCI. I am also a full-stack web developer.
Read more at the About page

I received my B.Sc degree from The Department of Computer Science and Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. I was a research student in The Husky Team supervised by Prof. James Cheng. I worked on distributed machine learning algorithms in nearest-neighbor search during my undergraduate studies.

My full CV and resume can be found here.

EDUCATION

- The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Aug 2018 - Exp. 2020)

- Master of Science in Computer Science

- The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Sept 2013 – Dec 2017)

- Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
- Minor in Business Economics
- Final Year Project: "Efficient Nearest Neighbors Search in Distributed Manner."

- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Jan 2015 - June 2015)

- Exchange Student, Computer Science

- Princeton University (Oct 2016)

- Short-term Exchange Visiting Student, Whitman College

PUBLICATION

[1] Jinfeng Li, Xiao Yan, Jian Zhang, An Xu, James Cheng, Jie Liu, Kelvin Ng, and Ti-Chung Cheng. “ A General and Efficient Querying Method for Learning to Hash” In Proceedings of the 37th ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD), 2018.

COOL PROJECTS

Projects are listed and can be found here

WORKING EXPERIENCE

Research Assistant (Jan 2019 - Present)
Computer Science Department, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

- Supervisor: Prof. Karrie Karahalios
- Research on providing a better tabular interface for relational databases

Assistant Engineer (May 2018 - Aug 2018)
Machine Learning Team, KKBOX

- KKBOX is an Asian online music streaming company with 40M tracks and 3.6M active users
- Responsible for initial survey and model creation for Smart Speakers - In charge of training data creation and testing data to train Natural Language Understanding - Promising intention and entity recognition during early controlled stages

Research Student & Summer Research Intern (Dec 2015 – Dec 2017)
Husky Lab - Machine Learning Team, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

- Supervisor: Prof. James Cheng
- Involved in GQR: A General and Efficient Querying Method for Learning to Hash. Project Homepage
- Final year project: "Efficient Nearest Neighbors Search in Distributed Manner."
- Summer Research Intern Project: “Implementation and Analysis of Collision Counting LSH on Husky.”

Web Administrator (Jan 2016 – May 2017)
Research Institute for the Humanities, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Summer Research Intern (July 2015 – August 2015)
Internet Security Team, National Center for High-Performance Computing

- Supervisor: Prof. Ann, Hsing-Yen
- Developed the Bad Domain Tracking System: retrieves and analyzes malicious fast-flux domains caught by honeypots

TEACHING EXPERIENCE

- Teaching Assistant - CS 242 : Programming Studio (Sept 2018 – Dec 2018)
Computer Science Department, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

- Instructor: Prof. Michael Woodley
- Lead discussion sessions and manage administrative matters for 200+ students

- Teaching Assistant - CSCI 2040 : Introduction to Python (Sept 2017 – Dec 2017)
Computer Science & Engineering Department, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

- Instructor: Prof. John C.S. Lui
- Designed final group project for the course of 110 students on financial data analytics using Python

EXTRA-CURRICULUM

- Initiator and coordinator (Oct 2016 – Dec 2017)
The Circle Group

- Founded this platform to connect CS and non-CS students academically through sharing and technical workshops
- Manages a team of 20 students working on The Circle Project and official website for Taiwanese Student Association
- Created a guide for incoming freshmen with over 6000+ views

- Information Officer (Oct 2015 – Oct 2016)
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Taiwanese Student Association

- Launched the organization’s online service and homepage.
- Assisted in technical setups for activities by the student association.

- Project Coordinator and Volunteer (Oct 2013 – May 2014)
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Morningside College

- Volunteered in Nepal to understand and evaluate needs of local people and provide solutions. [Report] [Journal]
- Volunteering proposal approved by the university with funding support.
- Awarded Reaching Out Award and Scholarship by the HKSAR [News Coverage]
- Awarded Taiwan Ministry of Education 2015 National iYouth Best Writing in Volunteering [News Coverage]

LANGUAGE & SKILLS

• Language: Native proficiency in Mandarin, Professional proficiency in English, elementary Cantonese and Taiwanese
• Programming Skills: Proficient in C/C++ and Python. Competent in Java, JavaScript, HTML, CSS
• Application Skills: Experienced in MEN framework, Node.js, Husky, MySQL and MongoDB
• Software and Other Skills: Experienced in Photoshop and photography (check out my flicker!)

Feel free to visit my LinkedIn.