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About Me

Richard Shan portrait

Hi! I'm Richard Shan, a Fab Academy 2024 alumnus. I currently am a member of the class of 2026 at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics in Durham, NC, where I am studying computer science and researching generative AI.

I have significant experience both in academia and industry. I've worked as a generative AI researcher and developer at multiple corporate firms, and have worked on many research projects and academic publications. I am very experienced in NLP, LLM fine tuning, developing RAG systems, building evaluation models, SLMs, building ML models, feature engineering, synthetic data generation and cleaning, and working with vector databases. I have worked with frameworks such as PyTorch, Tensorflow, Langchain, LlamaIndex, and the like. I am familiar working with tokenization, vector stores, and integration with APIs such as OpenAI, Pinecone, and Huggingface. Recently, I've been working a lot with RAGAS and ARES. To a lesser degree, I work on frontend development.

I have learned a lot about digital fabrication during Fab Academy, and have applied my CS skills in the engineering space. This is exemplified in my machine week project, where I handled the software development. Through building an advanced program and combining it with hardware components, we produced an impressive product. Additionally, my later weeks and final project are also pretty heavily software-oriented. I had a lot of fun exploring the intersection between programming and engineering, and how they work together to implement a solution.

In my free time, I enjoy playing ultimate frisbee and debating. I am an active member of my local Ultimate community, helping in hosting tournaments and attending leagues and events on weekends. I also play for my city's premier nationally-ranked high school men's ultimate team, and I have captained Charlotte's U17 men's ultimate team. I also captain my school's ultimate team on the field along with managing its logistics. I am also an avid debater, being consistently ranked in the top 50 high school public forum debate teams nationwide. I have championed multiple tournaments and have reached the top 10 debaters in most large national tournaments.

Student Agreement

The Fab Academy is responsible for:

  • Teaching principles and practices of digital fabrication
  • Arranging lectures, recitations, meetings, and events for the class
  • Evaluating and providing feedback on student work
  • Offering clear standards for completing assignments
  • Certifying and archiving student progress
  • Supervising class preparation
  • Reviewing prospective students, instructors, and labs
  • Providing central staff and infrastructure for students, instructors, and labs
  • Fund-raising for costs not covered by student tuition
  • Managing and reporting on the program's finances, results, and impacts
  • Publicizing the program
  • Promoting a respectful environment free of harassment and discrimination
  • Encourage a diverse, accessible, and equitable community

I am a Fab Academy student, responsible for:

  • Attending class lectures and participating in reviews
  • Developing and documenting projects assigned to introduce and demonstrate skills
  • Allowing the Fab Academy to share my work (with attribution) in the class for purposes compatible with its mission
  • Honestly reporting on my work, and appropriately attributing the work of others (both human and machine)
  • Working safely
  • Leaving workspaces in the same (or better) condition than I found them
  • Participating in the upkeep of my lab
  • Ensuring that my tuition for local and central class costs is covered
  • Following locally applicable health and safety guidance
  • Promoting a respectful environment free of harassment and discrimination

Signed by committing this file in my repository,
Richard Shan