Zifan He
Student Researcher at UCLA VAST Lab
Los Angeles, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolZifan He is a UCLA CS PhD student and researcher with nine years of software engineering and research experience focused on algorithm-hardware co-design for efficient AI systems, particularly FPGA and custom-architecture acceleration. Advised by Prof. Jason Cong, his recent work spans sparse linear solvers on HBM-FPGA and memory-aware transformer designs for long-context language models, with papers at FPGA, NAACL, and FCCM. He blends production-grade engineering experience from roles at Meta and Duolingo—where he built backend services, AWS integrations, and frontend microservices—with research internships that accelerated vector-quantized LLMs. An active contributor to AWS SDK examples on GitHub, he’s comfortable across C++, cloud services, and full-stack development. He holds a 4.0 BS and is pursuing a PhD at UCLA, combining rigorous theory with practical deployment know-how. Colleagues describe him as someone who bridges low-level optimization and end-to-end systems, often surfacing simple engineering fixes that yield outsized performance gains.
9 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
High School Diploma, High School Diploma at Shanghai Pinghe SchoolBachelor of Science - BS, Mathematics and Computer Science, 4.0, Bachelor of Science - BS, Mathematics and Computer Science, 4.0 at University of California, Los Angeles
Chinese, English, Japanese
Github Skills (9)
secrets-manager10
programming-language10
c-language10
cprogramming-language10
aws-sdk10
s3-bucket9
amazon-s39
aws-s39
documentation8
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
awsdocs/aws-doc-sdk-examples
Jun 2022 - Sep 2022
Welcome to the AWS Code Examples Repository. This repo contains code examples used in the AWS documentation, AWS SDK Developer Guides, and more. For more information, see the Readme.md file below.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 commits, 2 PRs, 1 comment in 2 months
Contributions summary:Zifan primarily contributed to adding and modifying example code related to AWS Secrets Manager within the AWS SDK for C++. Their commits demonstrate the implementation of code snippets for retrieving secret values and creating secrets using the AWS SDK. Furthermore, the user updated comments within the code examples, clarifying steps for users. The user also contributed to the S3 create bucket example by adding a snippet to clarify how to set a location constraint.
dotnetcpppythonjavascriptphp
OswaldHe/HMT-pytorch
May 2024 - Feb 2025
[NAACL 2025] Official Implementation of "HMT: Hierarchical Memory Transformer for Long Context Language Processing"
Contributions:3 reviews, 25 PRs, 38 pushes in 9 months
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