September 2016 - Present
Unversity of Waterloo
Undergrad Research Assistant on an Artificial intelligence project regarding Social Choice with Professor Kate Larson. The project aims to create a simulation model for individual and group preference and understanding the system that reveals true user preferences. I am also researching on the underlying relationship between various voting rules with guidance from Amirali Salehi-Abari and Kate Larson.
May 2016 - August 2016
Yahoo!
Software Engineer Intern
used NLP processing techniques for article content classification. Used Hadoop, Spark, Bash script for feature engineering on big data around 2TB.
September 2015 - Present
University of Waterloo
Co-president of App Dev club
June 2015 - August 2015
Internship at Trace Genomics
Website Developer and Asian Market Researcher of Trace Genomics
August 2012 - June 2015
Palo Alto High School
Founder and President of Application and Web Design club, leading projects, website design, and mentor relations
Software engineer for Paly Robotics Team
Head web developer and Chief of Technology for Haven Magazine, a student run publication about social justice
June 2012 - August 2012
Summer School at Junipero Serra
Studied a semester each of World History and English
2012
Moved to California
January 2012 - June 2012
Dalian Maple Leaf International School
Graduated at top of class
June 2011
Dalian University of Technology: Research Assistant
I performed mechanical engineering research in the laboratory of Dr. Wei Zhang.
2007-2011
Attached Middle School at Dalian University of Technology
2002
Moved to China
1997
Born
North Carolina
"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." --Thomas Edison

About Me

I am a Teaching Assistant for the Functioning Programming with Python and Java course at Palo Alto High School. I grade coding assignments, give feedback and answer questions. I also tutor Chemistry and Math after school.
I love watching lectures Coursera and Udacity to learn about subjects I know nearly nothing about. I took Udemy courses to acquire coding skills, such as the HTML/CSS/JS Web development course (statement of accomplishment). I am currently taking Machine Learning from Coursera to inhance my Machine Learning and Data Analysis skills.
I was on the robotics team at Palo Alto High school, on the Programming group. We are in charge of programming robot controller and drive train for motion control, sensing and object avoidance. We code in C++ and work in closely with the Engineering Build team to make sure our robots don't crash!
I enjoy research, both through doing experiments in the laboratory and through massive Googling and paper reading. Last summer we talked about GMOs for a section in Living Skills, which inspired me to do some after school research on the topic (slideshow). I am currently researching with Professor Kate Larson from University of Waterloo on a Artificial Intelligence project related to Social Choice.
I was chosen to give a talk at TEDxPaloAltoHighSchool on the importance of science journalism and fact-checking. Here is a transcript. Check back in February 2015 for video and slides from the talk.
I love photography. Some of my work has been featured (NYTimes, Liberating Lens, and WEST Summit Conference). I volunteer my services at community events. If you have an event that you would like to have photographed, contact me!
I enjoy competitive games like Chess, Go, and Trivial Pursuit. I draw cartoons. I like swimming, piano, reading, and badminton. I love to cook.

Machine Learning Projects

OpticalDigits Project
Created: December 2015
Optical Digits is a Machine Learning Project that trains the computer to accurately predict the digit presented on a given image. The Project uses IPython Notebookenvironment, which allows me easily analyze the output of each line of my script, and popular python libraries for data munipulating such as Numpy, Matplotlib, Pandas. The algorithm used in this Projects are: Nearest Neighbour, Support Vector Machine, and Softmax.
Spam Project
Created: December 2015
Spam Email is my second Machine Learning Project. This project also was created with IPython Notebook and used libraries such as Numpy, Matplotlib, Beautiful Soup, and Pandas. Just like my previous Optical-Digits Project, this is another classifier problem. I tried to implement algorithms such as: Gaussian Naive Model, Random forest model, Extra Trees Classifier, AdaBoost Classifier. However, this project happen to be more challenging than what I initially expected...

Web Development Projects

The Science Runway
The Science Runway project aims to connect young girls with female mentors in STEM fields. Through a series of quizzes, we match girls up with a female mentor who shares the same interests and passions. The goal of the project is to inspire girls to enter STEM fields and reach for the top, by showing them that current female leaders were once girls just like them.
Website development: Rolina Wu, Elspeth Wing, Nicole Li
Launched: June 2014
Paly Alto History
Sponsored by the Girl Scouts of America, the Palo Alto History project aims to illustrate the immigration history of the people of Palo Alto through stories, photographs, and film. I am in charge of designing and building the website, which will be used as a medium to disseminate the stories of these citizens and display a different dimension of Palo Alto.
Website development: Rolina Wu & Elspeth Wing; Project Creator and Interviewer: Christie Li; Filmmaker and Editor: Sophia Anderson; Community Service Coordinator: Zoe Lung
Launch date: March 2015
Citrus: a social platform for collaborative learning
After taking a lot of courses online, I realized that it is missing all the other aspects of school that I love: hilarious and inspirational teachers, friendships, heated debates, school pride, and a sense of belonging. So I decided to create a crowd-sourced online education platform that promotes community-based learning and embraces the emotional, personal, and social aspects of education. The goal of the platform is to transcend the boundaries of language, values, and attitudes between cultures and social classes.
Conception, design, and development by Rolina Wu
Planned Launch date: August 2016

Other Projects

Hackathon


NextGenerationY-SnakeGame
This project is not just a regular Snake Game, but a modified version that allows kids to find joy from doing math problems. In this game, the original "fruits" that are eaten by the snake is paired with numbers, where only one is the correct answer to the equation shown on the top of the screen. I served as the System Designer and Graphic Designer and used Java for this project.
Developed by Rolina, Elnathan, Rudra
Created: Jan 2015
HSHacks-MusicVoter
Music Voter is an IOS app that is made for those who share a passion for music and are eager to share and promote the music they enjoy to others. I served as the System Designer, Graphic Designer for this project. I used AppleScript/Objective-C for this project.
Developed by Rolina, Elnathan, Rudra, Sontheya
Created: Feb 2015

TreeHacks - Pigeon Point
Summarization App to boost productivity Used IBM Alchemy's concept extractor, NLTK, and K-Means for keywords clustering and sentence ranking implementation. The project summarizes content of your most current group conversation into few lines to increase your productivity. Project for TreeHacks.
Created: Feb 2016

Arduino



Arduino Project - Light Level Alert
The Arduino Project was created during a five hour Arduino Workshop. I was able to pick up the language for Arduino, the knowledge needed to build circuits, and create six small projects at the end of the workshop. The material used for all my Arduino Project are: 3 LED lights, 3 resistors, wires, a light sensor, a switch.
Developed by Rolina
Created: November 2015

Games


WaterWaterWater
This is a pixelated Water Simulation Game that uses Eulerian and Lagrangian particle physics in Java. I contributed on the algorithm and graphic design of this project.
Developed by Rolina, Agastya, Vik, Jameson
Created: November 2015
Gomoku
This is a Gomoku Solver that finds all the force wins for the current board setting using minimax algorithm and Threat Space Search. I designed a GUI using Model-View-Controller software archtectural pattern in Python.
Developed by Rolina, Agastya
Created: December 2015

Photographs

Abstract / Commentary



Culture / Life