Yihan Zhou (Joey)

Yihan Zhou (Joey)

About Me

I’m a third year PhD student at UT Austin under the supervision of Eric Price. Before I was a Master student at UBC and was co-supervised by Nick Harvey and Mark Schmidt.

Recently I’m studying active learning. Specifically, we’re working on designing Bayesian active learning methods with near-optimal theoretical gurantees. During my Master’s studies, my research revolved around first-order optimization methods and online learning. I am also interested in data-driven algorithms and differential privacy. More generally, I work on learning theory and like TCS problems. If you want to collaborate or even just chat with me, please send me an email!

“I’m one with the force and the force is with me.” – Chirrut Îmwe

More About Me This section is just a random walk of the thoughts in my head. (Yes, randomness is vital in algorithm design!)

I have a ton of hobbies, but I'm not really good at any of them. I enjoy poems, movies and literature. García Márquez is my favorite writer. Edward Yang is my favourite movie director. I watch and play soccer and basketball. I watch Dota 2 tournaments (not play the game anymore though). I support Liverpool and Inter Milan in soccer and Toronto Raptors in basketball.

Political activism is important. Fighting for the rights of underprivileged groups and against authoritarianism is everyone's duty. For example, we should all remember this as one of the worst atrocities against humanity in the 21st century.

Canada >> United States. Genshin Impact is a bad game. My favourite Star Wars character is Karis Nemik.

Occasionally, I write short stories here.

Here is a paper proving P=NP.
Interests
  • Learning Theory
  • Active Learning
  • Online Learning
  • Data-driven Algorithms
  • Optimization in ML
Education
  • PhD in Computer Science, 2021-Now

    University of Texas at Austin

  • MSc in Computer Science, 2018-2020

    University of British Columbia

  • BMath in Computer Science and joint major in Combinatorics & Optimization, 2015-2018

    University of Waterloo

Working Experience

 
 
 
 
 
Web Developer
Qlik
Jan 2016 – Apr 2016 Ottawa
Building a web app named Pythia to extract data from Google Analytics, New Relic, AWS EC2 and Elastic Search by making REST API calls and upload such data to Mongo Database. Creating an automatically updated dashboard of product information to improve team working efficiency.
 
 
 
 
 
Software Developer
NN Life Japan
Sep 2016 – Dec 2016 Tokyo
Designing and implementing a daily process in Windows PowerShell to fetch useful data and use the data to make predictions on the number of expected telephone calls daily. Using C# and Visual Studio to develop tools with simple WPF UI in order to simplify certain operations.
 
 
 
 
 
Teaching Assistant
UBC
Sep 2018 – Apr 2020 Vancouver
TA for third/fourth year algorithm and ML courses.