Resume
General Information
| Full Name | Chenda Duan |
| dcdduan@gmail.com | |
| Mobile | 310-254-5864 |
| Location | Los Angeles, CA 90025 |
Technical Skills
| AI & Machine Learning | Representation learning, Vision-Language Models (VLMs), Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), Reinforcement Learning |
| Frameworks & Systems | PyTorch, TensorFlow, CUDA, Docker, Linux |
| Programming | Python, C++, R, Java, SQL. |
Education
- 2024.9 - Expected 2028.6
Ph.D Student, Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of California - Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA
- Research: LLM/VLMs, AI for Science, Data Analysis, and general Machine Learning.
- Teaching: Associate Teaching Instructor: Data Mining, Probability and Statistics, Complex Networks
- 2022.9 - 2024.6
Master of Science, Computer Science
University of California - Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA
- GPA: 3.9
- Teaching: Associate Instructor for CS M152A: Introductory Digital Design Laboratory. Leading the lab, instructing the basic knowledge of verilog and FPGA.
- Teaching: Teaching Assistant for CS174A: Intro to Computer Graphics. Leading the discussion session with more than 50 students, lecturing advanced graphic knowledge and Javascript.
- Teaching: Teaching Assistant for CS33: Introduction to Computer Organization. Leading the discussion session with more than 50 students, lecturing basically computer organization and architecture knowledge.
- Core Courses: Cloud Computing, Data Mining, Adversarial Attack and Robustness, Advanced Computer Architecture, Hardware For Machine Learning.
- 2019.9 - 2022.6
Bacholar of Science, Computer Science
University of California - Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA
- GPA: 4.0
- Honor: Summa Cum Laude, Dean's Honors List
- Teaching: Learning Assistant for CS32: Intro to Computer Science, lectured more than 50 students.
- Core Courses: Algorithms, Computer Organization, Operating Systems, Computer Architecture, Network, Programming Languages, Database, Software Engineering, Computer Vision, NLP, Machine Learning
Work / Research Experience
- 2026.3 - Present
Research Intern
Alibaba, Accio Team
- Develop post-training methods for LLMs deployed in Accio Work.
- 2024.6 - Present
Ph.D. Student, Graduate Researcher
UCLA Prof. Vwani Roychowdhury's Group
- Developing an agentic video understanding framework for long-context video understanding and open-domain QA tasks.
- Designed a RAG framework for multi-hop QA tasks. Two papers: AAAI 2026 Oral and ICML 2026 under review.
- Developed a diagnosis pipeline that can process and analyze large-scale neuro-medical (iEEG) data. Built a large-scale, comprehensive dataset and benchmarks. ICLR 2026.
- Analyzed large-scale brain neuro data and developed models to decode human memories. Paper submitted to Nature and in revision after reviews.
- 2023.6 - 2023.9
Research Intern
Kuaishou Technology, Kling Team
- Developed vision-language models for video understanding.
- 2022.3 - 2024.9
Graduate Researcher
UCLA Prof. Bolei Zhou's Group
- Proposed a novel method and released a benchmark for embodied scene understanding in VLMs. Provided a large-scale dataset on spatial, temporal, and safety-critical scene understanding. CVPR 2025.
- Built MetaUrban, a compositional evaluation platform for embodied AI in urban spaces, enabling autonomous driving research at scale. ICLR 2025 Spotlight.
- Developed an improved Human-in-the-loop Reinforcement Learning method. The trained agent can master driving tasks in less than 30 minutes. NeurIPS 2023 Spotlight.
- Built and tested a platform for large-scale traffic scenario modeling and simulation for RL, IL, and autonomous driving. NeurIPS 2023.
Projects
- 2023.3 - 2023.6
AR Glass Assistants APP (Java, AR)
- Developed an AR Glasses Auxiliary Andriod App using Java, enabling image and sound capture and ensuring a s eamless user experience through efficient compression techniques.
- Integrating Google AR core to enable object detection and sound classification.
- Implemented a robust queuing system with congestion control to facilitate seamless data transfer between AR glasses and smartphones.
- Minimized latency effects through a special design, enhancing the real-time responsiveness of the system.
- Tested its resilience and reliability in real-world conditions for AR glasses.
- 2023.3 - 2023.6
Accelaration Library on Apple M Chip and NVIDIA GPU (MetalAPI, CUDA)
- Developed a high-performance GEMM operation program that can achieve 6 TFLOPS performance. Using C++ and Metal API.
- Developed an optimized Conv-2d program with CUDA, achieving comparable performance with cuBLAS
- 2022.9 - 2022.12
Gradient-based adversarial attacks against text transformers (Python, NLP)
- Using BARTScore and BLEURT as similarity constraints to perform a gradient-based attack against commonly- used text transformers to explore their potential robustness problems, using Python
- 2022.3 - 2022.6
C++-based Web Server (C++, CI/CD, Rest API)
- Built a NGINX standard web server with REST API capabilities using C++.
- Constructed a CI/CD Pipeline on GCP with Detailed log info, test coverage monitoring using Google Test, and codereview using gerrit. Setup a monitor dashboard to record up-time and request latency.
- Source Code
- 2021.10 - 2021.12
WebGL-based game (Javascript, WebGL, Computer Graphics)
- Designed and implemented an online basketball-shooting game with advanced graphic features, including shadow, texture, and reflections, using JavaScript and WebGL.
- Demo
- 2020.10 - 2020.12
Egglendar Online Calendar (React, SQL)
- Developed an online student calendar specially for international students, with features of importing and converting calendars, adding school course schedules, and finding classmates.
- Using Material-UI for designing and React for the front-end framework, and MySQL as the database.
Honors and Awards
- 2019 - 2022
- Dean's Honors List * 9
- Summa Cum Laude