About Zhihang: pronounced (in IPA) ʈʂʐ̩ː4xaŋ2

screenshot_20180528-2314561.pngI am a first second third-year Ph.D. student and researcher at the “U-Dub” (University of Washington) interested in the applications of high-dimensional data mining. Most of my research is under the supervision of the faculty at the Center For Statistics And The Social Sciences. I work under the guidance and advice of Professor Adrian Dobra. In addition, I am working with Professor Yen-Chi Chen. 

My research interests focused on solving social questions using complex high-dimensonal data mining methods and their applications, which involve some flavor of natural language processing and statistical learning. Specifically, this can be boiled down into two interwoven areas. The first (1) area is trajectory data mining, in which I pursue problems of forecasting and translation of information related to high-dimensional spatiotemporal data, such as cell phone, individual travel behaviors. Theoretically, I am interested in geometric methods for machine learning. I am also enthusiastic in methods curing noisy, heterogeneous and time-series data. The second (2) area is natural language processing. Mainly I am interested in conversational intelligence and natural language understanding, which requires an understanding of how language representation works. My research often focuses on leveraging individual and social behavioral patterns that shed light on how human interacts with human, place, and technology (such as artificial intelligence).  Together, I am passionate about bringing in social goods with the deliverables from my research.

Something I don’t claim expertise but have great interests: Robotics, Game Theory and (mostly) 19th century philosophy – the influential thinkers and great figures and their works, especially Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Mill and Bergson (I have a B.A. in Philosophy, anyway!) I love the poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and 苏轼.

Actively working with peers, I have interesting research discussions with my friend Castiel Zhuang, a promising young economist. Group work wise, I am a member of the Geometric Data Analysis Research Group starting Winter 2018, and the Working Group on Applied, Bayesian and Computational Statistics since Autumn 2016.

I code. I do statistics. I play drums with my band ‘Random Algorithms’. I shoot arrows with my recurve bow.  I hike a lot. I reached LEGENDARY level many times in Hearthstone, and I am a three-time Arena 12-winner. The photo above is outdated. For a more recent photo, please click here. My favorite composers at all time are Felix Mendelssohn, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Robert Schumann. My favorite pianists are Evgeny Kissin and Krystian Zimerman. What would I listen when I code?

Something I’d love to do in the future: Make to the HCT (Hearthstone Collegiate Tournament) Championship Game (prefer winning it); Intern at Boston Dynamics and visit New Zealand!

Links:

MyCV Github    LinkedIn   Kaggle   Twitter   MySchedule

(BTW: My kaggle username is: @littleprincess LOL…)

Updates: 3-17 Z.Dong has accepted the offer of an applied scientist at Microsoft. I am excited about expanding my research skills on real-world products that bring impact to people all over the world.

This page got its last major update on March 26th, 2019 by Z.Dong.