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A list of all the posts and pages found on the site. For you robots out there, there is an XML version available for digesting as well.
Pages
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About me
Posts
Jazz and Homesickness
Published:
On a cold January day in 2023 in Nashville, Tennessee, just before heading to the airport, I took a small detour to stop by Nashville Jazz Workshop. The venue was closed, but I stood outside for a moment, feeling as if a smooth piano melody were drifting through the air, quietly comforting my homesick heart. If this pairing of American jazz and my Chinese homesickness catches your attention, I invite you into a very personal story of mine, one that intertwines the life journey of an international student with a particular American jazz pianist. Happy 2026, from my home in Shenzhen, China.
What is it like to do AI research inside Nike?
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I’m feeling bittersweet because yesterday, December 19, 2025, was my last day at Nike. My six-month research internship culminated in three presentations across multiple time zones. While the details of the work will eventually show up in my MIT thesis next year, here I reflect on this unique journey of conducting AI research at a world-renowned brand.
Stolen Name: How Software Erases Identity
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Names are one of the first things a system asks for, and one of the easiest ways it reveals what culture it was built for. This post looks at how seemingly harmless assumptions in software can quietly erase identity, using Chinese names as the primary case study.
Networking Beyond Your Home Department: An MIT CS/AI Case Study
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How do you build real connections outside your home academic program or department, especially in a place like MIT? This post shares a simple playbook for doing exactly that, using my own path into the CS/AI community as a case study. The short version: find the right announcement surfaces, show up (even when you won’t understand everything), and keep the curiosity dial set to “loud.”
Cheatsheet for Your MIT Sloan Classes
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Hi there. If you wind up on this page, I assume you’re busy studying for your upcoming MBA Core exams at MIT Sloan.
Tutorial: MIT Thesis LaTeX Template with VS Code
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Let’s set up the MIT thesis LaTeX template locally!
Tutorial: Use LaTeX Locally with VS Code
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This post is a quick guide to setting up LaTeX on your own computer, so you can write papers, resumes, or dazzling “class notes” using LaTeX locally—without relying on internet connectivity. In other words, you won’t be tied to Overleaf: you can bring your laptop anywhere and keep working on your next big ideas.
6.8300 Final Project: Taming CLIP’s Captioning Bias: A COCO-Driven Analysis and Permutation Ensemble
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Abstract: Vision-language models like CLIP struggle with multi-object scenes, often favoring prominent objects or those mentioned first in captions. Using real-world COCO images, we show that CLIP’s caption-matching accuracy drops from 91.23% to 87.45% when object order is reversed. To address this, we explore a post-hoc mitigation: a permutation ensemble that averages scores across all object orders, boosting robustness and recovering accuracy to 90.04%. Our findings reveal persistent order biases and offer a simple, effective strategy to improve CLIP’s reliability in complex scenes.
portfolio
publications
Ordering from a menu using natural language
Published in United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), 2024
How to optimally organize information for a voice AI use case? One of my proudest works at SoundHound, now granted as a U.S. patent.
Recommended citation: Aung et al. (2024). ORDERING FROM A MENU USING NATURAL LANGUAGE. United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Patent Number: US-12124804-B2.
A Real-Time High-Precision Pedestrian Navigation Method, Device, and Related Components
Published in China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA), 2024
My first granted patent (yay) that improves indoor pedestrian navigation without additional onsite hardware.
Recommended citation: Ren, J. (2024). A Real-Time High-Precision Pedestrian Navigation Method, Device, and Related Components. China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA). Patent Number: CN112946323B.
talks
Talk 1 on Relevant Topic in Your Field
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This is a description of your talk, which is a markdown file that can be all markdown-ified like any other post. Yay markdown!
Conference Proceeding talk 3 on Relevant Topic in Your Field
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This is a description of your conference proceedings talk, note the different field in type. You can put anything in this field.
teaching
Teaching experience 1
Undergraduate course, University 1, Department, 2014
This is a description of a teaching experience. You can use markdown like any other post.
Teaching experience 2
Workshop, University 1, Department, 2015
This is a description of a teaching experience. You can use markdown like any other post.