Spring 2027
Software Developer Co-op (incoming)
IBM, Lowell, MA
Alexander Chin
I study how children and vision models learn to see, and build tools students use.
About
I'm a Math-CS major and Cognitive Science minor at UC San Diego, building full-stack tools, applied ML projects, and multi-agent systems (see projects). I also do research in DevPsych / CompCogSci studying how children learn.
Outside of class and code, I perform with LionDanceME, paddle Dragonboat/OC1, play various racket sports, and shoot photo/video for fun!
Open to Summer 2027 positions in:
- Research / REUs: computational cognitive science, developmental psychology, computer vision
- Industry: Software Engineering, Machine Learning, or PM Internships
Education
University of California San Diego
B.S. Mathematics-Computer Science
Minor in Cognitive Science
City College of San Francisco
A.S. Mathematics, Highest Honors
Contact
Jun 2026 - Sep 2026
Software Engineer, Contract
Essenergy Inc., Milpitas, CA
- Proposed and shipped end-to-end order-processing automation in Python/Playwright covering authentication, labels, tracking, invoicing, and inventory for 30+ weekly orders across 3 vendor portals.
- Made daily runs fully unattended by deploying the Dockerized workflow on AWS Lightsail with cron, screenshot-and-log email alerts on failure, and a CLI resume flag to recover interrupted runs.
- Cut daily remittance reconciliation from about 30 minutes to under 1 minute with a pipeline that auto-matches invoice numbers across 1,800+ rows from 2 vendors and flags invalid or suspicious entries.
Jun 2026 - Sep 2026
Data Analyst Intern
IDX Exchange, Remote
- Built a reproducible Python pipeline for 400,000+ CRMLS real-estate records automating ingestion, monthly consolidation, validation, feature engineering, and IQR outlier removal, dropping about 11% unusable records.
- Identified Sacramento as a high-growth market via analysis-ready feature tables and 2 Tableau dashboards covering closing activity, geographic trends, and agent and office performance.
Leadership and volunteering
Projects Director; previously AI Projects Mentor
- Run the project cycle for 8 SWE, AI, and Design teams via standups; organized workshops and showcases drawing 250+ students.
- Mentored AI teams from model training to deployment, writing starter code and reviewing pull requests.
Software Team
- Built and deployed a Discord bot for internal council use on AWS Amplify.
- Contributing to the council website's redesign and TypeScript rewrite.
Operations Manager & Talent
- Performed at 300+ shows across the San Francisco Bay Area, entertaining audiences and spreading culture.
- Built a digital attendance tracking system that logged 750+ events, replacing manual record-keeping.
- Led teams on-site at performances as primary contact with event managers and clients; also performed as a dancer.
“yán” - study
Research
I am broadly interested in how humans and models learn and abstract concepts, and how we can use this to improve our understanding of both human and artificial intelligence.
Undergraduate Research Assistant
Visual Learning Lab, Department of Psychology, UC San Diego
- Benchmarked the representational geometry of CLIP and DINO model families on a 15,000-image dataset, computing RDMs and Spearman correlations across 54 model-metric-embedding configurations.
- Extended the lab's open-source embedding package, vllpy, used across 4 lab projects, with 12 commits adding ranked RDM analysis, a BabyView-trained DINOv3 model, and a transformers compatibility fix.
- Built and maintained data pipelines for an infant word-recognition study, implementing automated gaze encoding and GPU processing to speed up data throughput.
- Fixed race conditions in the lab's gaze-annotation tool by centralizing claim and lock files and replacing PID-based temp file names with UUIDs, letting annotators on separate machines work concurrently.
Manuscripts and presentations
Manuscript in preparation
Conducting a study testing whether line-drawing embeddings preserve the geometry of photo embeddings, and how training objective and data affect it.
Research poster, 2025
Presented to faculty and students at the end-of-session symposium of the Transfer Research Experience Program, UC San Diego Department of Mathematics.
Other research positions
Undergraduate Research Assistant
- Conducted literature review and policy research on educational policy development in Brazil and Egypt.
- Analyzed the economic effects of higher-education institutions in South America and Africa using geospatial data analysis and econometric regressions in Stata.
Research Intern, Transfer Research Experience Program
- Selected as 1 of 4 students from 40 applicants for the department's initial cohort.
- Studied ML foundations and gradient-based optimization; trained classifiers on the MNIST and Mushroom datasets.
Teaching
Mathematics and Physics Tutor
- Tutored 20+ students weekly in calculus and physics.
“zào” - build
Projects
Best Use of Claude, UC Berkeley AI Hackathon 2026
SafeStreets
A multi-agent system that turns street imagery and public records into ready-to-send city council letters. Won among 200+ projects and 1,000+ hackers with a team of 4.
Co-built a two-stage vision pipeline: Claude assesses 1 satellite and 4 Street View images blind to community reports, then a separate pass corroborates each hazard against crash, 311, and news records.
Claude Vision, Fetch.ai uAgents, Browserbase, Redis, Mapbox
Cal Hacks 13.0
Recall
A real-time assistive system for people with dementia that tracks objects in a room from one webcam, using open-vocabulary detection and a temporal state model that infers occluded objects' locations. I led vision and state inference.
Recovers 3D positions by ray-casting detections onto a LiDAR room scan, and drives a Bluetooth LE wearable that points toward the object. Includes on-device Whisper STT and a grounded Claude agent for caregiver questions, with 270+ tests.
YOLO-World, Whisper, Claude, C++, Arduino
Open source, 1,000+ users
TSS++
An open-source course planner built as an alternative to UCSD's new student system, with prerequisite graphs, conflict detection, campus walking routes, and .ics export.
Reverse-engineered the undocumented TSS OData API from network traffic to scrape each quarter's sections, and built transitive prerequisite trees with AND/OR groups and cycle detection across 5,700+ courses. A daily GitHub Actions workflow detects newly published quarters and scrapes them automatically.
React, TypeScript, FastAPI, MongoDB, GitHub Actions
More projects
CrAIyons
Multiplayer drawing game scored by computer vision. Trained 4 category-specific CNNs over 60 QuickDraw classes for live in-game scoring, and replaced softmax scoring with class-centroid cosine similarity, raising one model's similarity score from 0.56 to 0.63.
PyTorch, WebSockets
ClassGraph
Engineered scraping pipelines to collect and transform 2,500+ courses into a structured SQL database with AST-backed representations. Designed a TypeScript prerequisite resolver parsing nested AND/OR logic and rendering dependency DAGs in D3.js, with a CI/CD pipeline that republishes new courses each quarter.
Python, Go, React, TypeScript, D3.js
SwapU
Student item-swap marketplace where Fetch.ai agents negotiate multi-item trades. Built the FastAPI backend (REST, WebSockets, Supabase PostgreSQL, S3, auth), integrated BrowserUse agents for real-time market prices and confidence scores, and validated the negotiation flow against 128 mock listings.
FastAPI, Supabase, WebSockets, Fetch.ai, BrowserUse
Quorum
Civic advocacy generator that turns a community's position on a local issue into a tactical organizing kit: plain-language briefs, procedural playbooks with source-backed facts, three recourse paths, precedent-based strategy, and a bilingual outreach packet.
Jac/jaclang, Python, LLM integration, Firecrawl, Apify
WebReg to ICS
Converts UCSD WebReg schedule PDFs into importable .ics calendar files, with a weekly schedule preview before download. Parses course data from the PDF, generates recurring lectures, skips UCSD holidays, and adds midterms and finals as one-off events.
Python, FastAPI, PyMuPDF, JavaScript, iCalendar
Minecraft Texture Generation
From-scratch walk through the history of image generation in PyTorch on Minecraft item textures. Roadmap: VAEs, VQ-VAE, VQGAN, flow matching, RAEs, and latent diffusion.
PyTorch, VAE, VQ-VAE, VQGAN, DDPM, latent diffusion, flow matching, RAE
Spotify Recommender System
Two-tower neural collaborative filtering model mapping user preferences and 900,000+ tracks into a shared latent space. Tuned embedding size and epochs, achieving 0.84 ROC-AUC and a 30% reduction in validation loss.
Python, PyTorch, pandas, NumPy
TroupeRoute
Vehicle routing optimizer for LionDanceME operations, modeling multi-stop routing as a constrained Traveling Salesman Problem using OpenStreetMap road networks. OR-Tools enforces time-window and overlap constraints across 40+ daily events.
Google Maps API, Python, H3, pandas, React
“lì” - experience
Resume / CV
Coursework
Mathematics
- MATH103A Abstract Algebra I
- MATH109 Logic and Proofs
- MATH152 Machine Learning Theory
- MATH154 Graph Theory
- MATH171A Linear Programming
- MATH173A Optimization Theory
- MATH180A Probability
- MATH180B Stochastic Processes
Computer Science
- CSE29 System Programming
- CSE100 Advanced Data Structures
- CSE101 Algorithm Analysis and Design
Cognitive Science
- COGS108 Data Science
- COGS118D Computational Models of Cognition and Behavior