Curriculum Vitae
H2 Contact and Links
… | … |
---|---|
Name | Liang (Leon) Lu |
lianglu@cs.cmu.edu | |
Website | chaosarium.xyz |
Github | github.com/chaosarium |
Portfolio | chaosarium.xyz/portfolio |
linkedin.com/in/leonlianglu |
H2 Education
H5 Carnegie Mellon University
H6 B.S. in Computer Science, Pittsburgh, PA, May 2022 – Present
… | … |
---|---|
Expected Graduation | Dec 2025 |
Planned Concentrations | Language Technology and Computer Systems |
Current GPA | 4.00/4.00 |
Activities and Societies | Flutonium (flute ensemble), IRIS Lunar Rover |
Honors | Dean’s List, High Honors, every semester so far |
Coursework | 15-411 Compiler Design 15-445 Database Systems 11-711 Advanced Natural Language Processing 15-213 Computer Systems 15-210 Parallel and Sequential Data Structures and Algorithms 15-251 Great Ideas in Theoretical Computer Science 15-122 Principles of Imperative Computation 15-150 Principles of Functional Programming 15-113 Special Topics in Applied Python Programming 21-325 Probability 21-127 Concepts of Mathematics 21-241 Matrices and Linear Transformations 21-259 Calculus in Three Dimensions 80-285 Natural Language Syntax 80-180 Nature of Language 85-102 Introduction to Psychology 98-242 Introduction to Esoteric Programming Languages |
H5 Nansha College Preparatory Academy
H6 High School, Aug 2018 – Jun 2022
… | … |
---|---|
GPA | 4.00/4.00 |
Weighted GPA | 4.61 |
Activities, Societies, and Honors | National Honor Society ΓΚΧ, Tri-M Music Honor Society (Vice President), South China Model United Nations (Secretary-General), Tech Solution Team (Manager), Student Government, Drama, Debate Team, Student Government, Wind Ensemble, Choir, China Thinks Big, Valedictorian |
Advanced Placement | 5 on AP Physics I, AP Physics II, AP Physics C Mechanics, AP Physics C Electromagnetism, AP Calculus AB, AP Calculus BC, AP Microeconomics, AP Macroeconomics, AP Chemistry, AP Statistics, AP Computer Science Principles, AP Seminar, AP Computer Science A, AP Biology, AP Research |
H2 Publications
… | … |
---|---|
2024 | Liang Lu, Peirong Xie, and David R. Mortensen. Semisupervised Neural Proto-Language Reconstruction. The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) (to appear). |
2024 | Liang Lu, Jingzhi Wang, and David R. Mortensen. Improved Neural Protoform Reconstruction via Reflex Prediction. The 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024). |
2024 | Mihir Mongia, Tyler M. Yasaka, Yudong Liu, Mustafa Guler, Liang Lu, Aditya Bhagwat, Bahar Behsaz, Mingxun Wang, Pieter C. Dorrestein, and Hosein Mohimani. Fast Mass Spectrometry Search and Clustering of Untargeted Metabolomics Data. Nature Biotechnology, Jan 2024. |
H2 Teaching
H5 Instructor:
- (incoming) 98-317 Hype for Types, Spring 2025
H5 Teaching Assistant:
- 15-251 Great Ideas in Theoretical Computer Science, Fall 2024
- 15-150 Principles of Functional Programming, Fall 2023
- 15-150 Principles of Functional Programming, Spring 2024
H5 Lectures:
- Web Programming and Flask in 15-113 Special Topics in Applied Python Programming, Spring 2023
- Machine Learning and PyTorch in 15-113 Special Topics in Applied Python Programming, Spring 2023
H2 Skills
… | … |
---|---|
Programming | Rust, C, C++, Python, Go, JavaScript, TypeScript, SQL, GraphQL, Standard ML, OCaml, x86-64 assembly, HTML, CSS, Java, GraphQL, jq |
Technologies | Data and ML: PyTorch, NumPy, Pandas, NLP, Deep Learning, Neural Networks, Research, Matplotlib, seaborn; Systems: Compiler Design & Engineering, Database Engineering; Full-Stack: Node.js, Axum, Express.js, Flask, Svelte, React, Electron, MongoDB, REST API; General: Algorithms, Git, Regex, Linux, LaTeX |
Languages | Fluent: English (TOEFL 114), Mandarin, Cantonese; Fair: French; Learning: Japanese, Esperanto |
As a Hobbyist | Graphic design, Web design, Video editing, Photography, Flute performance, Music arrangement, Conducting, Music composition, Algorithmic Art, Data visualisation |
H2 Work Experience
H5 Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science
H6 Teaching Assistant, 15-251 Great Theoretical Ideas in Computer Science, Aug 2024 – current
H5 Vertex, Inc.
H6 Software Development Engineer Intern, Jun 2024 – Aug 2024
- Designed and implemented an interpreter for a custom configuration language to automate data flow from API sources into a data warehouse, speeding up data ingestion workflow by 12 times and saving 10+ hours every week for the team
- Developed mechanisms for the interpreter to handle API limitations such as page size limits and recover from rate limits and network failures, allowing reliable processing of 1,000,000+ rows of data
- Provisioned cloud infrastructure using Terraform and GitHub Action to sync developer data from 2k+ repositories with one button
- Powered productivity metrics dashboards updated and viewed weekly by 20+ senior leaders, enabling data-driven decisions for 800+ developers to improve software development efficiency and code quality
H5 Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science
H6 Teaching Assistant, 15-150 Principles of Functional Programming, Aug 2023 – May 2023
- Designed and graded homework assignments on functional programming in the Standard ML programming language
- Taught labs to 30+ students and held weekly office hours to help students understand course content and appreciate functional programming
H5 Mohimani Lab, Carnegie Mellon University
H6 Software Developer Research Assistant, Jan – May 2023
- Developed a mass spectrum database with Professor Hosein Mohimani’s team to index, cluster, and query against terabyte-scale genomics and metabolomics datasets for antibiotics discovery (Rust, 80k lines, fully documented and unit-tested code base)
- Optimized the large-scale tandem mass spectrometry data clustering algorithm Networking+ and improved accuracy of the memory-efficient mass spectrometry search tool MASST+, achieving speed ≥ 2 orders of magnitude faster than existing tools
- Implemented index data structures and caching strategies for spectrum databases while performing testing and profiling to ensure their correctness and efficiency
- Created data visualizations to analyze software performance
- One publication in Nature Biotechnology: Fast mass spectrometry search and clustering of untargeted metabolomics data
H5 Thousand Sunny Technology Ltd.
H6 Software Developer Intern, Summer 2022
- Built blockchain testing infrastructure automation system with Electron desktop application and React front-end
- Developed internal dashboard with REST API, Redis, and JavaScript to control and monitor hundreds of nodes
H2 Research Experience
H5 Database Group, Carnegie Mellon University
H6 Researcher; Since Jun. 2024
- Something like making LLMs look at databases
H5 Proto Language Reconstruction Project, LLab at CMU Language Technology Institute
H6 Student Researcher / Research Intern, Summer 2023; Research Group Member, Since Jan 2023
- Pioneering novel neural techniques to improve reconstructions of protolanguage word forms, advised by Professor David R. Mortensen
- Achieved 3% and 1% accuracy improvement on Middle Chinese and Latin reconstruction respectively compared to state-of-the-art methods (Python, PyTorch, 10k lines, 4,000+ experiments on WandB)
- Developed a new neural architecture for the new NLP task semisupervised protoform reconstruction and achieved accuracy 2 to 7 percentage points higher than all baseline methods, advancing the field of computational historical linguistics
- LREC-COLING 2024 paper: Improved Neural Protoform Reconstruction via Reflex Prediction
- ACL 2024 paper: Semisupervised Neural Proto-Language Reconstruction
H5 GANCA-3D
H6 Researcher, a Computer Vision Project for AP Research, 2021 – 2022
- Designed cellular automata based model for 3D structure generation
- Trained and tested various models on dataset (PyTorch)
H5 NLP Research with Dr. Xubo Qin
H6 Student & Researcher, Summer 2021
- Reviewed literature on neural machine translation, information retrieval, and search ranking
- Built prototype translators and search engines
H2 Volunteering
H5 Nansha College Preparatory Academy (High School)
H6 Web Developer & Server Manager, 2019 - 2022
- Developed and maintained multiple online booking systems for rooms and studios on campus (JavaScript)
- Facilitated collaboration and incorporated code contributions
H5 Berkeley Bay Area Writing Project
H6 IT Support Specialist, Guangzhou, July 2019
- Assisted participants and staff with computing-related issues
- Facilitate publicity of the program via media technology (videos, photos, etc.)
H2 Projects
See also Portfolio
H5 Question Answering RAG System for CMU and LTI
H6 Homework 2, 11-711 Advanced NLP, Feb 2024 - Mar 2024, team of 2
- Scrapped and cleaned webpage data to create a corpus containing information about the history, events, courses, culture, etc. of CMU, SCS, and LTI
- Developed a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) system that retrieves information from the corpus to answer questions
- Annotated question-answer pairs and performed extensive experiments to test different LLMs and prompting techniques
- Achieved the best performance among all submissions in the class
H5 Co Language and Compiler
H6 Final project, 15-411 Compiler Design, Jan 2024 - May 2024, team of 2
- Designed the Co programming language, which allows programmers to write concurrent programs while building on top of the simplicity and safety of C0
- Implemented a compiler for Co, with support for concurrency features like coroutines, channels, and mutexes
H5 C0 Compiler
H6 Semester-long project, 15-411 Compiler Design, Jan 2024 - Present, team of 2
- Designed and implemented a C0 (a memory-safe subset of C) to x86-64 compiler in Rust (in a team of 2)
- Made 400+ commits, opened 40+ pull requests, passed 10,000+ test cases
H5 BusTub
H6 A working database! Class project, 15-445 Database Systems, Jan 2024 - Present, solo
- Completed the implementation of a relational database management system (RDBMS)
- Implemented key components of the RDBMS including a buffer pool manager, a disk-backed hash index (extendible hashing), an execution engine with query optimization, and an optimistic multi-version concurrency control scheme
H5 Influx
H6 Building a new language learning app
- Designing and creating an open-source, NLP-enhanced, content-based language learning app
- Developing algorithms and data structures for text processing (Rust), multi-lingual tokenization and lemmatization integrations (Python), back-end with REST API (Rust, Axum, SurrealDB), and front-end user interfaces (Svelte, TypeScript)
H5 15-213 Computer Systems Class Projects, May 2023 - Aug 2023, solo
H6 Various system-level programming projects
- a high-utilization dynamic memory allocator
- a shell that supports running and managing concurrent foreground and background jobs
- a multi-threaded TCP/IP proxy server with cache
- a cache simulator
- cache-optimized functions for matrix computation (performance ranked #1 in class leaderboard)
H5 C0VM.TS
H6 A vidual C0 debugger, Dec 2022 - Jan 2023, contributor
Contributed to a source-available browser-based editor, bytecode interpreter, and debugger for the C0 programming language (a safe subset of C) used by hundreds of students in CMU’s introductory C programming class. Technologies used include TypeScript and React.
H5 NCPA room reservation system
H6 Oct 2019 - May 2022, solo
Implemented and maintained online booking systems for music practice rooms and art studios on campus (JavaScript, Express.js); managed Git repository, performed code review, and incorporated code contributions.
H5 COVID-19 Donation Platform
H6 Jan 2020 - Feb 2020, solo
Developed an online donation platform in collaboration with 4 student organizations in high school to assist Wuhan Union Hospital at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic (Node.js), raising a total of ¥75,000 (CNY).
H2 Honors & Awards
… | … |
---|---|
Aug 2024 | Best Paper Award (Non-Publicized), The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) |
Fall 2023 | Dean’s List, High Honors, Carnegie Mellon University |
Dec 2023 | Honorable Mention, 2024 Undergraduate Researcher Award, Computing Research Association |
Spring 2023 | Dean’s List, High Honors, Carnegie Mellon University |
Fall 2022 | Dean’s List, High Honors, Carnegie Mellon University |
2021 | 2021 Global Citizenship Award, East Asia Regional Council of Schools |
2021 | First prize (open round top 10%) and Silver medal (final round), International Linguistics Olympiad China |
2021 | Gold Medal and Global Top 150, Sir Isaac Newton Physics Contest |
2021 | Distinction and School Champion, CEMC Hypatia Contest |
2021 | Distinction and School Champion, CEMC Euclid Contest |
2021 | Distinction, CEMC Fermat Contest |
2021 | Silver, Canadian Chemistry Contest |
2021 | First Prize (individual) and Humanitarian Prize (team), China Thinks Big |
2020 | National Honor Society |
2020 | Champion, 2020 Shenzhen Fall Tournament, National High School Debate League of China |
2019 | Distinction, School Champion, and Honour Rolls Group III, CEMC Fryer Contest |
2019 | Distinction, School Champion, and Honour Rolls Group IV, CEMC Pascal Contest |
2019 | Quarter-Finalist, 2019 Guangzhou Spring Tournament, National High School Debate League of China |
H2 Certifications
- Neural Networks and Deep Learning, taught by Andrew Ng, Coursera, certificate
- Improving Deep Neural Networks: Hyperparameter Tuning, Regularization and Optimization, taught by Andrew Ng, Coursera, certificate
H2 Activity / Leadership and Service
H5 IRIS Lunar Rover
H6 Dec 2022 – Jan 2023
- Helped develop and test missing control protocol to operate the IRIS rover on the moon
- IRIS was launched to the moon in Jan. 2024 with the Peregrine Lander
H5 Tech Solution Team, NCPA
H6 Manager, 2019 – 2021; Member, 2018 – 2022
- Directed IT Helpdesk to help solve tech problems on campus
- Assisted events held by other student organizations using technology
- Provided service at the IT Helpdesk for 120+ hours
H5 South China Model United Nations (SCMUN)
H6 Secretary-General, 2021 - 2022; Deputy Secretary-General, 2019 - 2021; Chair, 2019
- Organized, directed, and managed the three-day inter-school SCMUN X conference
- Assisted the Security-General in organizing and directing the SCMUN IX conference
- Chaired the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) at the SCMUN VIII conference
- Revised SCMUN’s design system
H5 Tri-M Music Honor Society, NCPA
H6 Vice-President, 2020 - 2021; Music Director, 2020 - 2021; Member, 2019 - 2022
- Planned charity music events
- Arranged music and conducted music performances
- Entertained elderly people in the local community, helped disabled children succeed in music, and raised funds for charity organizations
H5 Student Government, NCPA
H6 Representative, 2018-2019; Promotion Team, 2019-2020; Representative, 2020-2021
- Represented students’ voices and pushed for changes to improve students’ life
- Led collaborations with other student organizations to organize events for the student body
- Designed promotional materials
H2 Theatre
… | … |
---|---|
2021 | Richard Green / Mr. Frederick Polk in The Murder Mystery at the Murder Mystery |
2019 | Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol |
* This page may be out of date