Fetching Data!

Photo of me at Brown
"Is that a dog over there?"

About

Hi there, I'm Ivan!

I'm a designer, engineer, and dog-lover from Bellevue, WA. Tech is slowly taking over the world and I want to help be on the right side of it, building products and supporting those who want to make a difference in the world. This has manifested itself in a few ways:


I love understanding decision making frameworks, both from a technical perspective (such as algorithmic decision making) and from a psychological perspective (especially around human factors). This has pushed me to explore and read books in consumer psychology or complete projects that analyzes people's motivation. I want to learn as much as I can, which you can track that through my Goodreads account or follow some of my musings!

Other things of interest (in no particular order): human-computer interaction and how we use technology to define the world around us, design thinking in regards to our workspace, home, and technology, LGBTQ+ initiatives in the startup and venture capital scene, Celeste, social deduction games, baking, crosswords, art history, rock climbing, dogs, and musicals.

If you're a student who identifies as LGBTQ+ and/or is building a startup, I would absolutely LOVE to hear from you and chat! Feel free to email me at izhao@dormroomfund.com.

News

Stay up to date on what I've been up to!

November 2020

Signed on to join Blend as a software engineering intern for next summer! Excited to make impact in meaningful ways!

October 2020

Joined Dorm Room Fund on the Boston team. Excited to invest in the next generation of startup founders on a national scale 🇺🇸

July 2020

Started Tea Time with a couple of friends, a community for LGBTQ+ people interested in tech and tech adjacent industries

Dec 2019

Joined Van Wickle Ventures, Brown's student-run evergreen VC fund as a student associate

Oct 2019

Attended IDEO Colab's Makeathon in Cambridge where I helped make digital communication easier using BERT models

June 2019

Worked at Loftium as an Operations Intern! Joined the Renter Operations Team where I helped with maximizing Airbnb performance and created a Messenger Chatbot

Sept 2018

Moved to Providence and started at Brown where I plan on double-majoring in Applied Math and Computer Science (wish me luck hehe)

Projects

Here's some stuff that I've worked on

Roll Call

product development

A mobile app built in React Native on PostgreSQL and Express for users to create a voting plan for the upcoming 2020 election. Halted due to issues with submitting to app store

Lunch Meet

IvyHacks 2020

design development

A lightweight video calling app made for IvyHacks that allows users to randomly find other working professionals, students, and people who want to chat with someone during their lunch break.

Staying Informed Just to Feel Something

Twitter Virtual Hackathon

design development

Participated in Twitter's Virtual Hackathon and built out "Staying Informed Just to Feel Something", a webapp using Twitter API, IBM Tone Analyzer API, and a CNN DL Model that processes tweets around specific trends/hashtags that are important in a given location or given time in order to determine the emotion and truth value associated with a tweet. Built in React, Flask, and Tensorflow.✨Won Best Social Hack✨

Tarrey Town Audio Player

development

A lightweight audio player experience to replicate the side quest from Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Built as an introduction to audio players in React

Optical Music Recognition

CSCI1430: Computer Vision

classwork development

Reading sheet music is pretty hard. For a computer, it's even harder. As such, a couple of my friends and I built out software that allows users to input in a page of sheet music and returns the corresponding MIDI file. The overall structure used traditional vision methods (bounding boxes, feature detection) combined with a CNN for classification. I specifically worked on data processing, feature detection, and model architecture and training.

Communify

Adobe Creative Jam

design

Prototyped Communify, an iPad app that allows kids ages 11-13 to interact with each other, compete in daily challenges, and learn more about the coronavirus. Done in response to Adobe x Nick's Creative Jam Design sprint. Conducted research on target user behavior and completed finished prototype on Adobe XD. Top 20% Finish

Rhyme Time

CSCI1470: Deep Learning

classwork development

Worked on a team with three other students to build out a LSTM model that creates limmericks. Approached the project by first scraping for 80,000 limmericks online, processing data, feeding it through the model and then outputting a probability distribution for the estimated next syllable using CMU's phoneme dictionary. Personally worked primarily on data processing and model architecture.

Wander

Hack Lodge

design development

Project created during Hack Lodge Summer 2019, a week-long hackathon repurposed to build a shippable product for public use. Wander is a mobile app, built using React Native, Expo and Firebase, that allows users to create itineraries, view other user's trips, and view upcoming and past trips. Uses Google Places and Search API to allow users to search for locations of interest.

Search Algorithm

CS18

classwork development

What better way to learn Google's search algorithm than by implementing it yourself? A Scala program that implements a simpler version of Google's search algorithm (including Page Rank) that works on large corpuses.

Seattle's Startup Ecosystem

Newport High School

classwork research

Conducted in conjunction with Collegeboard's AP Capstone program. Completed a full-year reasearch project on social variables that contributed to tech entrepreneurship in the Greater Seattle Area. While most literature focuses on the psychological aspects (Myer-Briggs, Big 5 Personality, etc.), this paper differentiates itself by looking at a specific field (tech) while also looking into a wider range of variables. Data was analyzed using a multi-variate regression model. Worked under Rob Prufer.

Skills

Programming Languages:
Frontend:
Database/Backend:
Mobile:
Others: