I am a junior at the University of Washington, studying computer science.

While I love all things CS, I have a particular hobby-like interest in Artificial Intelligence, especially in NLP and RL.

Move your mouse to direct Steve the cartpole!

Currently, I am a SWE intern at Panopto. Previously I was an intern at Arine and Two Sigma. I will be returning full-time to Two Sigma next fall!

Take a look at some of the things I've worked on over the years! ⬇️

Blog.

Musings, tutorials, explanations... perhaps the occasional recipe.

Projects.

These are some things I've worked on, either because a neat idea caught my attention or I had a problem I wanted to solve.

Growing MNIST digits with neural cellular automata
Generating fractals with complex "neural networks" Blog post
GradeBook, an intuitive grade viewer
otp_, a commandline one-time password interface
poly, an 8bit multiplayer platformer (WIP!)
Wells, an illustration of various gradient descent methods

Models.

These are implementations of papers I found especially cool.

Neural Turing Machines [Graves et al.,2014]
Recurrent Models of Visual Attention [Mnih et al.,2014]
Deep Recurrent Attentive Writer [Gregor et al.,2015]
Deep Q Networks [Mnih et al.,2013]
Sketch-RNN [Ha & Eck,2017]

Film Photography.

I think film is such an interesting medium! Hoping to someday incorporate Polaroid and medium format.

Click on a photo to scroll to it, or just scroll left to right if you're on touchpad/mobile.

Preface

These photos are not supposed to be "good" in any traditional sense, or even in any non-traditional sense. They're mostly an experiment for myself to explore older methods of photography, as well as be more hands on (literally!) and cautious about the photos I take.
Roll 3: ???-???, Tri-X 400

This was actually one of the first rolls I ever took, but for some reason never developed until recently.

I think I was mostly messing around with this roll, since I was just testing out the camera at the time, but I still managed to get a few decent photos out of it.
Unknown, Canon A-1 @ 50mm
Seattle Suburb (+ birbs!), Canon A-1 @ 50mm
My car, Canon A-1 @ 50mm
Roll 2: Feb 2021 - Mar 2021, Portra 400

This roll was actually taken before Roll 1, but was developed later. I've decided just now to order the rolls by their development date.

This was a fun roll because we had a few snow days this year and I was able to capture some of those moments with the film camera. In addition, this roll features a lot of varied photos from around the Seattle/Bellevue area.

These photos don't have the best scan quality. I'll probably come back in a few days and rescan them.
Seattle Center, Canon A-1 @ 50mm
Space Needle, Canon A-1 @ 50mm
Space Needle, Canon A-1 @ 50mm
Pacific Science Center, Canon A-1 @ 50mm
Alweg Monorail, Canon A-1 @ 50mm
Meadow Wood Park (self-timer, I'm a bit blurry), Canon A-1 @ 50mm
Meadow Wood Park, Canon A-1 @ 50mm
Roll 1: Mar - Jul 2021, Portra 400

I was really excited to use color film, and it was a ton of fun seeing the photos after they were developed.

I also didn't self-develop this roll, because I was worried about messing up the chemistry since color film is generally trickier to get right.

In fact, I was so worried about ruining the film that I scanned them with the protective cover still on (shoutout to Omega Photo in Bellevue!), and you can see the lip of the cover on the photos! I thought it gave them a more personal, sentimental look to it so I decided not to edit them out.
UW, Canon A-1 @ 50mm
UW Red Square + Faint Mt. Rainier, Canon A-1 @ 50mm
UW, Canon A-1 @ 50mm
UW Quad, Canon A-1 @ 50mm
UW Quad, Canon A-1 @ 50mm
Pike Place, Canon A-1 @ 50mm
Mount Si, Canon A-1 @ 50mm
Rattlesnake Ridge, Canon A-1 @ 50mm
Rattlesnake Ridge, Canon A-1 @ 50mm
Roll 0: Oct 2020 - Feb 2021, Ilford HP5 PLUS

Since this roll was taken during the school year, a lot of my photos were taken at UW, and this will likely be a recurring theme in the future.

This roll was self-developed, and some photos gained post-processing artifacts because of the way I handled them. Obviously not perfect but I thought it looked cool :)

Also at this point I hadn't figured out the specifics of the scanning system (using my laptop screen as backlight while I took pictures with a macro lens) so you can sometimes see the pixels of my laptop.
UW Red Square, Canon A-1 @ 50mm
Seattle Boat Launch, Canon A-1 @ 50mm
UW Willow Hall, Canon A-1 @ 50mm
UW Willow Hall, Canon A-1 @ 50mm
UW, Canon A-1 @ 50mm
Nathan Yan :: résumé · nathancy@cs.uw.edu · github