Zeyuan (left) being awarded by Rob Kostald
Rob is the head coach of USACO

Zeyuan Allen Zhu

You're the ^th visitor.
My Curriculum Vitae (to be added).
Last Update: Nov. 23^rd, 2009.

Education

Tsinghua University

• I'm an undergraduate student (08/2006 – present)
      in Fundamental Science Class (Academic Talent Program, initiated by Nobel laureate Chen-Ning Yang), Department of Physics, Tsinghua University
      with Mathematics and Physics major, overall GPA 91.5 (rank 1st / 45), major GPA 93.0 (rank 2nd / 45)
• I was a high school student (09/2000 – 06/2006)
      in Nanjing Foreign Language School
      with English major.

Selected Awards

Full list see here. Pictures see here.

Research Experience

• I'm an undergraduate researcher (05/2009 – present)
      in Institute for Theoretical Computer Science (initiated by Andrew Yao), Tsinghua University. Mentor: Elad Verbin, Xiaoming Sun
• I'm an internship researcher (09/2009 – present)
      in Theory Group, Microsoft Research Asia. Mentor: Pinyan Lu
• I was an internship researcher (01/2009 – 09/2009)
      in Machine Learning Group, Microsoft Research Asia. Mentor: Weizhu Chen, Gang Wang

Research Interests

Game Theory, Data Structure, Algorithm, Learning, Quantum Informatics

Research Topics

• Game Theory (09/2009 - present)

  • Working on lower / upper bonds for combinatorial auctions.
  • Based on the two-facility game question raised by A. D. Procaccia and M. Tennenholtz. [to be submitted to EC’10]
    • Improved the best known randomized upper bound from n/2 to 4.
    • Improved the best known deterministic lower bound from 2 to n/2.
    • Generalized the two-facility truthful mechanism to general graph, with an upper bound of 4.

• Data Structure (06/2009 - present)

  • Studied the cell probe model by M.Pătraşcu and its related works.
  • Proposed a substitute proof for Omega(lgn/lglgn) lower bound in replace of the chronogram, using cache elimination and encoding arguments. It is tight for union-find and rank.
  • Working on the external memory model lower / upper bounds, for predecessor, union-find, membership, etc.

• Complexity (03/2008 - 05/2008)

• Studied the Boolean Analysis and attempted to incorporate it in bounding the block sensitivity.

• Quantum Informatics (06/2008 - 08/2008)

• Studied the some related topics regarding distinguishing unentangled states with unentangled measurement.
  I was selected to be a student of Mingsheng Ying but unluckily his entire group moved abroad, so I abandoned this topic.

• Convex Optimization (01/2009 - 06/2009)

  • Discovered and proved the inverse time dependency for Lp-regularized convex optimization, based on the study of logarithmic regret and regularized risk. [ICDM’09]
  • Proposed P-packSVM algorithm to handle parallel kernel SVM, programmed on 1024-processor HPC cluster, overwhelmed Google’s PSVM in both efficiency and accuracy. [ICDM’09]
  • Proposed a new efficient stochastic gradient descent method to solve multiple kernel learning on the scale of 10,000 samples.

• Web Search Optimization (01/2009 - 08/2009)

  • Proposed a novel Bayesian model to predict click through rate using Bayesian inference, where the transition probabilities are explained by summation of Gaussian RVs and learned via Expectation Propagation. [WSDM’10]
  • Helped my colleague to establish novel approaches to RankBoost. [CIKM’09, working paper]
  • Proposed a divide-and-conquer strategy to rank the search result using clustering. [CIKM’09]

Publications

Academic Friends

Here I list the names of my co-authors and friends who helped me a lot during my research, in alphabetical order.

• Theoretical Computer Science:
  Zhenming Liu (Harvard), Pinyan Lu (MSR Asia), Xiaoming Sun (ITCS, Tsinghua), Xiaorui Sun (SJTU), Elad Verbin (ITCS, Tsinghua), Yajun Wang (MSR Asia), Qin Zhang (HKUST) Yuan Zhou (CMU).

• Machine Learning:
  Weizhu Chen (MSR Asia), Zheng Chen (MSR Asia), Derek Hao Hu (HKUST) Thomas Minka (MSR Cambridge), Shai Shalev-Shwartz (Hebrew University), Gang Wang (MSR Asia), Haixun Wang (MSR Asia), Chenguang Zhu (Tsinghua).

Visiting Abroad

01/2010 Pending	USA	Austin, Texas (SODA 2010)	Sent by Tsinghua University.
07/2009	USA	Redmond	Invited by Microsoft, canceled due to H1N1 Flu.
04/2009	Sweden	Stockholm	Sent by Tsinghua University. Invited by ACM/ICPC.
11/2008	USA	San Francisco and Mountain View	Invited by Google.
11/2006	USA	New York	Invited by Google.
08/2006	Mexico	Mexico City and Merida	Sent by Ministry of Education of China.
06/2006	USA	Denver and Colorado Springs	Invited by Rob Kostald, head coach of USACO.
08/2005	Poland	Warsaw and Nowy Sacz	Sent by Ministry of Education of China.
07/2004	Japan	Tokyo and Yokohama	Sent by Ministry of Education of China. Invited by Tokyo Institute of Technology.

Personal Information

• Email: zhuz...@hotmail.com. Please email me for address or phone numbers, if necessary.
• Hobbies: mountain hiking, photographing, English writing, paper cutting, tennis, singing, etc.
• Olympiad of Informatics: I maintained a website for Olympiad of Informatics before 2006. (It has been badly damaged recently)
• Problem Setter: I am/were the programming contest problem setter for Topcoder, USACO, Peking University, Zhejiang University, SPOJ, etc.