Biography

I'm a 2nd-year undergraduate student at the University of Toronto's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. I love to learn, and I'm passionate about tackling tough interdisciplinary engineering challenges spanning software and hardware engineering. My interests include machine learning, computer architecture, image processing, and augmented reality.

I previously did research with the Discovery program, where I studied pedagogical development in engineering graduate students using thematic and sentiment analysis. Our work also involved applied natural language processing using NLTK in Python.

Outside of school, I'm also a member of the University of Toronto Aerospace Team's Space Systems group, where I'm working on building circuitry for next-generation satellites.

For a sense of what I'm learning, I publish my notes.

News

• [May 2024] I will be joining the President's Advisory Committee on the Environment, Climate Change, and Sustainability (CECCS) as a part-time sustainability research assistant. I will be supporting improvements and optimisations for an applied natural language processing (NLP) model to analyse course offerings.
• [May 2024] I will be joining the Intelligent Sensory Microsystems Laboratory (ISML) as a research assistant, supervised by Mustafa Kanchwala and Prof. Roman Genov. My work will support the hardware platform for a neural recording and stimulation system.
• [Aug. 2023] I presented our work with the Discovery program at the Undergraduate Engineering Research Day (UnERD), winning an award for the Top Researcher.
• [May 2023] I will be joining the Discovery program as a research assistant until August, supervised by Prof. Dawn Kilkenny.

Work

Past projects:

Whack-an-Engineer

A whack-a-mole inspired game written in Verilog for a Cyclone V FPGA (on Terasic's DE1-SoC platform). We had custom IO, with PS/2 keyboard/mice and VGA display, incorporated complex finite state machines, and clock crossing.

Student Spaces in Residence

A client engineering project to redesign residence spaces on the University of Toronto's St. George campus. Our conceptual design specifications proposed improvements with a focus on safety and cost.

Posters:

• Iteration of Virtual Modules to Enhance Graduate Pedagogy in a High School STEM Program. Biomedical Engineering Society Annual Meeting (BMES '23), Oct 2023. Nhien Tran-Nguyen, Jason Zhang, Daire Crawford, Nicolas Ivanov, Graeme Noble, Dawn M. Kilkenny.
• Assessing Resource Effectiveness for Engineering Graduate Student Pedagogy Development. Undergraduate Engineering Research Day (UnERD '23), Aug 2023. Jason Zhang, Daire Crawford, Nicolas Ivanov, Nhien Tran-Nguyen, Dawn M. Kilkenny.