Experience

Education

2026–
PhD, Computer Science · UCLA, Los Angeles, CA
  • Continuing on from MS. Research at the intersection of HCI and AI — knowledge representations of academic literature, adaptive interfaces.
2024–2026
MS, Computer Science · UCLA, Los Angeles, CA
  • Advised by Eunice Jun. HCI + AI research.
2020–2024
BS, Computer Science · UCLA, Los Angeles, CA
  • Probably should've finished the mathematics double major...

Experience

2024–2026
CTO & Co-founder · Excavaite
  • Built terabyte-scale patent corpus with RaBitQ-indexed vector search.
  • Designed agentic systems for patent leakage prevention, automated patent drafting, and claim-chart generation; instrumented automated evals to gate model and prompt changes.
  • Raised pre-seed ($400k+); landed 6-figure pilot with a Fortune 500 partner; managed 8+ contractor team.
2023–2024
Undergraduate Researcher · VAIL Lab
  • Worked on diffusion models for synthetic driving-data generation, resulting in a NeurIPS 2024 publication.
  • Created a unified terabyte-scale driving dataset by combining 4K YouTube driving footage with open-source datasets.
Summer 2023
Software Engineer Intern · Confluent
  • Built a last-resort metadata recovery tool (Java) for the Kafka Metadata Team — reduced metadata-related cluster failure recovery from hours to minutes.
  • Wrote a user-facing runbook and design doc to support tool usage and ongoing development.
Summer 2022
Software Engineer Intern · Meta
  • Built a centralized Hack code-generation framework for the Metrics Platform Governance team — cut data onboarding from ~1 hr to ~5 min.
  • Added parallelism to script execution, reducing runtimes 4×.
2021–2023
Machine Learning Intern · Agrofocal Technologies
  • Implemented a mixed-precision quantization pipeline, improving inference throughput 80%+ and cutting latency 2×.
  • Implemented a state-of-the-art model architecture, improving object detection by 0.15+ mAP.

Publications

2026
Syrup: An Intermediate Representation for Bidirectional Human-AI Scientific Reasoning under review
M. Simon*, Y. Xiao*, N. Agarwal, E. Jun (* equal contribution)
2024
SimGen: Simulator-conditioned Driving Scene Generation
Y. Zhou, M. Simon, Z. Peng, S. Mo, H. Zhu, M. Guo, B. Zhou · NeurIPS 2024

Awards & honors

2021–2024
Dean’s Honor List, UCLA (4×)
2020
National Merit Finalist
2020
Marilyn Bussey IB Scholarship, Sequoia HS
2020
Sequoia Math Award, Sequoia HS
2020
IB Diploma
2020
RCM Level 10 First-Class Honors — Piano Practical, Music Theory, Music History
2017–2020
AMC 10/12 Top Scorer, Sequoia HS (3 consecutive years)

Service & teaching

2026
Teaching Assistant · UCLA
  • Upper Division CS 188: AI for Human Interaction.
2025
Reviewer · ICLR 2026