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Andrew Zheng

Undergraduate Student
University of Maryland, College Park
azheng15@umd.edu


About Me

I am a Senior at University of Maryland, College Park, double majoring in Computer Science and Mathematics. I am interested in learning more about Computer Vision, Natural Language Process, Diffusion Models, and Quantum Computing. Although I have minimal in-depth research experience, I would enjoy doing a research project in a large amount of topics to see what interests me. Aside from school, I really enjoying teaching and playing chess, basketball and ice hockey.

Research Interests

Projects

NLP Information Storage and Retrieval

In a research class I am currently taking at the University of Maryland, I got to work on a research project that focused on building a cost-effective database that is able to hold many documents and rank the most relevant documents to a query very quickly. In addition to providing an accurate ranking scheme, we are interested in seeing how much we can improve the speed of the database as well as the storage needed for the database without too much tradeoff in the accuracy of the ranking system the database is supposed to provide. In order to decide how the algorithm embeds the documents that come through, we will provide some mathematical analysis as to why this is the best and why our method is generalizable over many different large document collections.

Once I have decided on the way the database embeds the documents and encodes the ranking method, then, I will compare my method with state-of-the-art methods and decide which methods are the best. I will mostly be comparing the accuracy of my method and seeing how much it drops compared to state-of-the-art methods. Then, I will focus on what our method brings to the table in terms of speed and memory usage.

Fantasy Basketball Project

(NASA Goddard Internship) Binning Techniques for Solar Wind and Geomagnetic Data

Experiences

Teaching Assistant (CMSC250)

Expanding on my past teaching experience, being a TA for an actual university class taught me how to teach class in a fast but understandable manner to students. As a TA, I led a discussion section, graded student work, and held office hours. Not only did I give personalized help in a 1-1 manner to students in office hours, but I also had the chance to lead my own discussion section. I was grateful that I was able to lead my own discussion section because it gave me more freedom to teach in a matter that would help the students understand the material in a conceptual manner and help answer the question “Why?” to course material instead of just looking at the “How?”. In addition, I also had the opportunity to grade work that reflected the things that I taught in a setting where my teaching mattered more. This grading gave me feedback to areas in the coursework where students had more confusion in. These areas of confusion allowed me to figure out what to emphasize during my discussion sections and office hours.

I really enjoyed my TA experience and I wish to do more in the form to teaching later on. Teaching college courses suits me as well since in college, courses get to a point where they are actually interesting and the importance of actually understanding the “Why?” becomes more important instead of just learning the “How?”. I would definitely be interested in teaching more college-level courses in the area of computer science or mathematics.

Kumon Math and Reading Center of Clarksville

At this job, I taught a lot of students of differing ages, from toddlers to students in high school. Predominantly, I taught high-level math, which included topics from Algebra II, Precalculus, Calculus I and Calculus II. I really enjoyed this job because it allowed me to interact with the same students and watch each student grow.

(Internship) NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

At this internship, I worked with a large dataset containing solar wind and magnetosphere data. Throughout this internship, I learned a lot about the physics behind the relationship between the Earth’s Magnetosphere and solar wind and how to conduct data analysis on large data. However, I felt like I gained the most on the thought process behind doing research. In the end, I really enjoyed this experience because I was given autonomy to do research on areas that related to the project and accept or reject ideas based on the unique circumstances of my project.

Courses Taken at University

Hobbies

Chess: Ever since I was around 5.5 years old, I’ve been playing chess competitively. Over time, I became really good at board game, winning state championships and playing at invitational events. Here are some of my achievements:

My Chess.com Account: bravehorse

Ice Hockey: I started playing ice hockey when I was around 7 years old. In my ice hockey career, I played in both high school leagues and club ice hockey leagues playing with other future D1 players. Here are some of my achievements in ice hockey:

Basketball: I’m a bit too short to play basketball well competitively but it has always been a fun sport for me to play. Whenever I have free time, I usually spend it playing pickup basketball. Recently, basketball has become one of my favorite hobbies because it’s a way to connect with friends and engage in an activity that is beneficial for everybody.


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