Brian Hsu - PHD Candidate

Brian Hsu

PHD Candidate

Lemont, Illinois, United States

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Summary

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Senior

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Top School

Brian Hsu is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at the University of Chicago and a visiting researcher at Argonne National Laboratory, specializing in reinforcement learning for automating scientific workflows and self-driving labs. He develops LLM-powered robotic agents and distributed contrastive learning methods to enable scalable hypothesis generation, advanced planning, and experiment automation. His background combines an MS in Statistics and data-driven modeling with practical experience in diffusion+LLM hybrids, contrastive learning, and agentic learning frameworks. Brian has 17 years of engineering experience and notable open-source contributions to high-impact projects like OpenPBS and the SOCI C++ database library, demonstrating deep systems and backend expertise (including cross-platform build and Python integration fixes). He bridges rigorous academic research with production-minded engineering, often focusing on robustness and deployability in complex HPC and robotics environments. Outside core research, he applies statistical and sparse numerical methods to novel problems such as forecasting and synthetic data generation.

17 years of coding experience

3 years of employment as a software developer

Master of Science - MS, Statistics, Master of Science - MS, Statistics at Northwestern University

Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science at University of Chicago

Github Skills (22)

c-language10

python10

job-scheduler10

databases10

hpc10

db210

pbs10

sql10

cpp10

cprogramming-language10

relational-databases10

sql-database10

database10

devops8

cloud-computing7

Programming languages (2)

C++C

Github contributions (5)

openpbs/openpbs

Oct 2020 - Jun 2022

An HPC workload manager and job scheduler for desktops, clusters, and clouds.

Role in this project:

Back-end & DevOps Engineer

Contributions:37 reviews, 10 commits, 15 PRs in 1 year 8 months

Contributions summary:Brian primarily contributed to the OpenPBS codebase by implementing fixes and enhancements related to core functionalities such as staging, job array handling, and Python module integration. They also addressed build and configuration issues, including changes required for Python 3.9, 3.10, and Fedora Core 33 compatibility. Furthermore, the user improved the logging mechanisms and incorporated access to `pbs_errno` within the `pbs_ifl` Python module. The commits demonstrate a good understanding of the build process and overall system.

slurmprovisioningschedulingclustersscheduler

SOCI/soci

Aug 2012 - Apr 2013

Official repository of the SOCI - The C++ Database Access Library

Role in this project:

Backend Developer / Database Engineer

Contributions:18 commits in 8 months

Contributions summary:Brian primarily contributed to the SOCI library's DB2 backend, addressing issues related to database interaction. Their work focused on correcting SQL handling, fixing statement execution, and improving data type mapping for 64-bit systems. They also implemented functionality for getting affected row counts and integrated common tests within the DB2 backend tests. Moreover, they added support for atomic transactions and updated build configurations.

db2cppmysqlnosqldatabase-access

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