Biography

I'm a 3nd-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 programming language design, systems software, computer architecture, machine learning, image processing, and reconfigurable computing.

I was previously a student data scientist with the President's Advisory Committee on the Environment, Climate Change, and Sustainability (CECCS), where I supported the development, expansion, and deployment of a natural language processing (NLP)-based machine learning model. The model was built primarily in Python with scikit-learn, pandas, Polars, and spaCy, and was used to develop the university's undergraduate sustainable course inventory.

Before that, 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.

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.
• [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.