![Jason Zhang](content/headshot.jpg)
Jason Zhang
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:
![Pixel art style game start screen, titled Whack-an-Engineer](content/whack_an_engineer.jpg)
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.
![Project 2](content/student_spaces_in_residence.png)
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.