About
- building products to help people at Intus Care, Loftium, and Mojotech
- supporting ecosystems at Entrepreneurship Program, BRIC and Tea Time
- making investments at Van Wickle Ventures and Dorm Room Fund
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
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Roll Call
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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
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Lunch Meet
IvyHacks 2020
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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.
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Staying Informed Just to Feel Something
Twitter Virtual Hackathon
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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✨
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Tarrey Town Audio Player
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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
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Optical Music Recognition
CSCI1430: Computer Vision
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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.
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Communify
Adobe Creative Jam
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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
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Rhyme Time
CSCI1470: Deep Learning
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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.
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Wander
Hack Lodge
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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.
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Search Algorithm
CS18
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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.
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Seattle's Startup Ecosystem
Newport High School
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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
