Hi, my name is

Yiqi "Viscent" Zhang. (张懿麒)

A non-typical geek.

From neurons to neural networks.

From microscopes to supercomputers.

The future awaits.

About Me

I am a PhD student at HPC-AI Lab in National University of Singapore, currently focusing in high-performance machine learning systems.

Meanwhile, I have 4 years of experience in Neuroscience. Details are available in my CV.

My expertise include but not limited to below:
  • High Performance Computing
  • Machine Learning Systems
  • Heterogeneous Computing
  • Neuroscience
  • Medical Imaging

Experience

PhD student - NUS HPC-AI Lab
Jan 2023 - Present
HPC-AI Tech is a cutting-edge lab that integrates high performance computing seamlessly with deep learning. Topics of research interests encompass Machine Learning, High Performance Computing, Machine Learning Systems, Parallel and Distributed Systems, and AI Applications (e.g. CV, NLP, Biology). HPC-AI Lab @NUS is directed by Presidential Young Professor Yang You.
Graduate Researcher - KCL Academic Neuroscience Centre
Apr 2022 - Jan 2023
Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience is a world-leading research group aiming at decoding the brain. We proposed and implemented a Bayesian U-Net for MRI super resolution, which yields high resolution images as well as a reference-free metric indicating model-data fitness. Through comprehensive testing, we showed that the model successfully performed SR in a variety of data including young adult brains, neonatal brains, and glioblastoma-affected brains, in which the B-UNet exhibited state-of-the-art performance. Based on the reference-free metric, we also designed an automated Bayesian model selector to ensure the optimal output quality without referencing to a ground truth image. By virtue of strong connection with the industry, this work is expected to largely facilitate the diagnosis in areas with poor access to high-field scanners.
Student Researcher - SUSTech Brain Research Centre
Sept 2019 - Dec 2021

The lab mainly focuses on ischemic stroke and Alzheimer’s disease, their mechanism and treatment using MCAO and APP/PS1 mouse model. During the research, I conducted various types of experiments, including electrophysiological data acquisition and analysis (LFP/EEG), immunohistochemistry assay, animal behavioural experiments and cell experiments. The skills and experience gained from both physiological and molecular experiments make me ready for a variety of challenges in wet lab. Apart routine biological works in wet lab, I also developed various stimulation delivery devices from whisker stimulator to rhythmic light flicker with synchronization capability to psychology software.

The project I led, 40 Hz light flicker alters human brain EEG microstates and complexity with implications in brain diseases (Yiqi Zhang et al., 2021), is published on Frontiers in Neuroscience. We investigated the EEG features including microstates and connectivity on 20 healthy young adults exposed to 40 Hz flicker and reported unprecedented findings on the EEG microstate complexity.

Education

2023 -
PhD in Data Science
National University of Singapore
2021 - 2022
MSc in Neuroscience
King's College London
Grade: Distinction
2018 - 2022
BSc in Biological Science
Southern University of Science and Technology
Grade: Summa Cumme Laude

Publications

SpeedLoader: An I/O efficient scheme for heterogeneous and distributed LLM operation
SpeedLoader: An I/O efficient scheme for heterogeneous and distributed LLM operation

The 38th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems

In this work, we redesign the data flow of heterogeneous hardware and sharded model training to minimize the excessive communication overhead. Our proposed scheme significantly enhances training and inference throughput of large language models under restrictive computational resources.
AADG: Automatic Augmentation for Domain Generalization on Retinal Images
AADG: Automatic Augmentation for Domain Generalization on Retinal Images

IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging

Our AADG framework can effectively sample data augmentation policies that generate novel domains and diversify the training set from an appropriate search space. Specifically, we introduce a novel proxy task maximizing the diversity among multiple augmented novel domains as measured by the Sinkhorn distance in a unit sphere space, making automated augmentation tractable.
40 Hz light flicker alters human brain EEG microstates and complexity with implications in brain diseases
40 Hz light flicker alters human brain EEG microstates and complexity with implications in brain diseases

Frontiers in Neuroscience

Previous studies showed that entrainment of light flicker at low gamma frequencies provided neuroprotection in mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and stroke. We studied healthy adult's EEG response to 40 Hz Flicker.

Achievements

Overall Champion of 4th APAC HPC-AI Competition
HPC-AI Advisory Council
AI Special Prize of 4th APAC HPC-AI Competition
HPC-AI Advisory Council
First prize winner of ASC20-21
ASC20-21 Student Supercomputer Challenge (ASC committee)
Highest Linpack Benchmark Winner
SC21 Virtual Student Cluster Competition (ACM SIGHPC/IEEE)
Accelerated Computing C++/Python
Certificated by NVIDIA DLI
Third Place Winner of ISC22
ISC22 Student Cluster Competition (HPC-AI Advisory Council)
President's Graduate Fellowship
National University of Singapore

Get In Touch

My inbox is always open. Whether you have a question or just want to say hi, I’ll try my best to get back to you!