Matthew Zhang

I'm a fourth-year student currently double majoring in Statistics and Computer Science. I enjoy being able to form hypotheses from messy data and debug complex systems to quantify the root causes of hard problems.

I have both a background in industry—with agent-based validation for in-car voice systems at Lucid Motors and building 0 → 1 full-stack software for research labs that supports real experiments—and an academic research background in networks, specifically network measurement and validation.

I'm also interested in the oracle problem, where validation is only as reliable as the standard used to judge whether a system is correct. I want to build validation methods whose judgments are measurable, auditable, and grounded in real-world outcomes.

If I were to pick one area to work in for the rest of my life, it would be forward-deployed engineering: specifically, being able to understand customers and build a system that achieves their goals within a set of constraints, then validate it statistically to make it not only reliable, but also scalable later. I think it is quite similar to research in the way you turn the unknown into measurable hypotheses that can be iterated on and developed, which I enjoy.