About
I spent my undergraduate life at Vanderbilt University (2016-2019), and I majored in Mathematics and Computer Science.
I’ve always believed in the mutual influence between technology and ideology. New ideas, values, and worldviews emancipate people from the shackles of mind and allow us to envision everything in new ways and thus permit technological advances to be deployed. In turn, newer technologies radically transform societies and thus rip older institutions and barriers apart and destabilize the forces that shackle the minds.
Currently, I am an ML Generalist working on Facebook ads. My projects try to model users’ Facebook activity intents.
Academically, I’ve spent time in Medical Imaging, Computer Vision, 3D vision, multi-modal/multi-tasking learning. I had terrific experiences collaborating with Professor Landman of the MASI lab and Professor Kunda Maithilee of AIVAS Lab.
My take on Machine Learning and AI: Asking machines to learn like humans is not to teach machines to discern “truth” from “falsehood”. There is no objective truth in this world. The world, in its most natural form, is not supposed to be categorized, segmented, or understood. It’s simply a jumbo mess of basic molecules following certain natural laws that we can never fully re-express. Therefore, categorizations, segmentations, and rationalization are the ways humans “overfit” this world. Therefore, to me, artificial intelligence means “to teach machines to overfit like humans”, and I don think we can have autonomous agents overfit the world like us if we give them only rationality but not irrationality, the brain but not the body, the joy but not the pain, the jubilation but not the regret and etc.
In my spare time, I love watching talks, reading history, philosophy related books, or classical novels. My favorite sports are tennis and swimming, but I usually just go for a run for exercise.
My Favourite Books: My favorite novel right now is One Hundred Years of Solitude from Gabriel García Márquez. My favorite philosophy book is Plato’s The Republic. The history book (series) of choice is Eric Hobsbawm’s trilogy on the “long nineteenth century” (The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire)
Photography: Be sure to check out my tiny photographic gallery as well! I usually go on a photographic trip every year. I have not decided where I should go in 2020 yet and the pandemic is kind of in the way.
Contact
Email: yiyuan.yang at vanderbilt.edu
Resume: https://drive.google.com/file/d/12Ppg76O0NNI9_TX-PfS9AOY18sOTFViM/view?usp=sharing
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yiyuanyang/
github: https://github.com/yiyuanyang