Projects, experiments, and questions I am trying to understand.

• FlyHeadactive project

  A testbed where a GPU-simulated whole-brain fruit-fly connectome (FlyWire, 138,639 neurons, 15.09M connections) drives a real wheel-legged robot. I built the platform around the upstream LIF model, including sensor encoders, the neuron decoder, safety layer, LiDAR SLAM navigation and web console.

  interactive site ↗
• Sky Atlaslive site

  A live, bilingual stargazing site that computes visibility for any place and time. I built the FastAPI back end, three.js front end, API docs, monitoring, and tests; the site renders about 109,000 real stars across 16 orders of magnitude of scale.

  live site ↗
• ANSYS_simulation_IOPresearch code

  Finite-element models of the eyelid and eyeball for a home-use transpalpebral tonometer. During my Shenzhen InnoX Academy internship, I wrote the ANSYS APDL models and scripts that supported the probe-control and calibration work behind three patent applications.

• code-with-piactive experiment

  A terminal broker where an AI coding agent and its user watch or take over the same live shell. I wrote it in C11 over Windows ConPTY and POSIX PTY with authenticated local IPC, and added CI tests on Windows and Linux.

• ForgeSpec-Studioprototype

  An AI-assisted CAD tool that turns a loose engineering brief into a reviewable assembly specification. I built it to generate deterministic CadQuery source from a standard-parts library and export STEP and STL with a browser preview.

• ANSYS_skillexperimental

  A validation layer for automated ANSYS Mechanical runs. I built it to record the stage each run reached and the result evidence behind it; a cantilever benchmark matches Euler-Bernoulli theory within 0.223%.

• LanZhi Medical · Shenzhen InnoX AcademyJul 2025 – present

  Embedded & Algorithm Development Intern — A home-use transpalpebral tonometer for monitoring glaucoma-related eye pressure. Built the Bluetooth link, closed-loop motor control, signal filtering and calibration, and finite-element simulations of the eyelid and eyeball. Outputs include embedded modules for the device, a simulation workflow and 3 invention patent applications; the project won Second Prize at the National Medical Insurance Innovation Competition.

• XJTLU Academy of Artificial Intelligence · University of Liverpool2024 – present

  Research Assistant — Deep learning for detecting clinically significant prostate cancer in MRI, with Assoc. Prof. Hong-Seng Gan. Designed the ReFER and PAD-Former models, ran benchmark studies on a Slurm cluster, and handles day-to-day administration of the group's GPU platforms (an NVIDIA A800 cluster and two 8-GPU RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell servers): user accounts, container environments and job scheduling. Produced first-author papers at IEEE BIBM 2025 and 2026, a read-only audit of the two RTX PRO 6000 servers, and a written proposal for unified Slurm scheduling.

• Final Year Project · XJTLUSep 2026 – May 2027

  Multi-Channel Miniaturised Wireless Electrochemical Sensing Platform — Supervised by Dr Qifeng Lu (Associate Professor, School of CHIPS). A multi-channel, multi-protocol electrochemical acquisition platform for the sensors developed in Dr Lu's group, extending the open-source NanoStat design. Handles system design, firmware and host software; so far a redesigned board supports four-channel electrochemical acquisition and skin-impedance measurement, with web-based host software, and wearable integration is the next step.

• Finkey · Shuangfu Technology (Suzhou)Aug 2025 – present

  Co-founder & Embedded Software Lead — An open-source hardware security key for OTP and FIDO2 authentication, building on Google OpenSK and incubated at XJTLU's entrepreneurship hub. Co-founded the company and leads embedded software development in Rust on Tock OS. Shipped 100+ units in small batches.

• ByteDance · Volcano EngineDec 2025 – May 2026

  Technical Operations Intern — Evaluation of large models and AI-coding products at Volcano Engine. Benchmarked large models on reasoning, coding, tool use and instruction following, and analysed LLM-agent products and AI-coding workflows. Delivered evaluation reports and triaged community issues for product and engineering teams.

• Z.ai (Zhipu AI)Aug 2025 – Apr 2026

  Campus Ambassador — Zhipu AI's campus programme at XJTLU. Gave technical talks on LLM inference infrastructure (vLLM, SGLang) and set up a Dify campus partnership. Hosted a Dify-based agent hackathon for students.

• DeepBlue Technology (Shanghai)Apr 2024 – Jun 2025

  Embedded Software Engineer Intern — A wheeled-biped robot. Developed gait control and motor-control interfaces in a master–slave design, using a Raspberry Pi 5 for planning, SLAM and obstacle avoidance. Gave public technical talks on the company's AI and robotics products.

• Fudan University · Intelligent Perception & Autonomous Systems LabJun 2024 – Aug 2024

  Research Intern — An autonomous research vehicle on ROS 2. Built LiDAR perception, SLAM localisation, path planning and motion control on a Jetson NX and integrated them into one ROS 2 navigation pipeline.

• East China Normal University · Intelligent Ultrasound Research CenterNov 2023 – May 2024

  Research Intern — Biomedical electronics for electrical stimulation and sitting-posture monitoring. Core developer of a multi-channel electrical-stimulation system (firmware, wireless links, Flutter control app, bio-impedance closed-loop output) and of a pressure-array cushion that recognises sitting posture.

• Sanyi 3D Technology (Qingdao)Jan 2024 – Mar 2024

  Embedded Full-Stack Engineer Intern — Large-format FDM 3D printers. Designed and assembled printers, simulated delta kinematics in SolidWorks, and configured Marlin firmware for motor and sensor control.

Publications

1. Z. Zhao et al., “PAD-Former: A Two-Stage PI-RADS Classification Framework with Multi-Modal Anomaly Diffusion and Cross-Attention,” IEEE BIBM 2025.
   first author · DOI
2. Z. Zhao et al., “ReFER: Learned Soft-Region Priors for Clinically Significant Prostate Cancer Detection and Diagnosis in Biparametric MRI,” IEEE BIBM 2026.
   first author · accepted, to appear

Leadership and outreach

• XJTLU Science Innovation Association2023 – 2025

  President, two terms — XJTLU's student science and technology association (200+ members). Served two terms as president and led development of the X-SIA member platform. Co-organised NVIDIA China Developer Day at XJTLU (~200 attendees).

• JetBrains · MathWorks

  Campus Ambassador — Developer-tool and engineering-software outreach. Provided on-site technical support for JetBrains at Apsara Conference 2024 and 2025. Ran MATLAB and Simulink campus outreach at XJTLU for MathWorks.

Current interests

Systems · Developer Tools · AI Agents · Engineering Software · CAE · Scientific Computing · Embedded · Medical AI

1. 微电子学习工具笔记
   Sep 22, 2026 · Note

   课程工具、操作说明、官方配图与RC练习。

2. A result object is not an evaluated result
   May 17, 2026 · updated Aug 11, 2026 · Build Note

   Why automated ANSYS Mechanical work needs separate geometry, setup, solver-input, solved, evaluated, and credibility gates.

3. Separating DNS failure from slow CDN delivery
   Apr 29, 2026 · updated Aug 11, 2026 · Note

   A redacted remote-development download investigation that isolates resolver, redirect, edge-selection, and throughput stages.

4. Separating measured cough-model runs from the experiment plan
   Apr 27, 2026 · updated Aug 11, 2026 · Research Note · Working

   A subject-disjoint Coswara pipeline, compact teacher–student baselines, and the evidence boundary before any clinical or SOTA claim.

5. What the HarmonyOS prototype could and could not verify
   Aug 4, 2026 · updated Aug 11, 2026 · Build Note

   ArkTS UI, browser OAuth and deep links, native Mihomo libraries, VPN Extension limits, and repository-level evidence.

About

I use coding agents during development and keep each project's problem definition, architecture, experiments and validation open to inspection. My current work spans AI infrastructure, hardware/software co-design, high-performance computing, embedded systems, biomedical sensing front ends, connectome-driven robotics and medical imaging AI.

Email · GitHub · CV (PDF)