Hi! I am Zhanwen Chen (he/him/his), a recently graduated master's student at the Biomedical Elasticity and Acoustic Measurement Laboratory and the Artifficial Intelligence and Visual Analogical Systems Lab at Vanderbilt University.

My CV is here

Research Interest

I am fascinated by one research question: how to develop computational systems that could extract, understand, accumulate, and reason with syntactic knowledge from videos and text? I try to ground this long-term goal to the following problems:

• How to apply both syntactic and semantic knowledge in answering visual-textual questions
• Answering questions with social/emotional reasoning: (ICDL '20)
• Learning with small, well-characterized datasets or by imitation
• How to translate from natural language specifications to programming languages and back
• Broadly, how to make robots reason with both vision and language

Research Papers

• Characterizing Datasets for Social Visual Question Answering, and the New TinySocial Dataset

  Zhanwen Chen, Shiyao Li, Roxanne Rashedi, Xiaoman Zi, Morgan Elrod-Erickson, Bryan Hollis, Angela Maliakal, Xinyu Shen, Simeng Zhao, Maithilee Kunda

  Joint IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning and on Epigenetic Robotics (ICDL), 2020.

  [Paper] | [Presentation]

• Noise Suppression in Ultrasound Beamforming Using Convolutional Neural Networks

  Zhanwen Chen

  Master's Thesis

  [Paper]

• Compact Convolutional Neural Networks for Ultrasound Beamforming

  Zhanwen Chen, Adam Luchies, Brett Byram

  IEEE International Ultrasonics Symposium (IUS), 2019

  [Paper] | [Code]

Industry Experiences

• Application Developer, Vanderbilt Institute for Clinical and Translational Research
• Full-Stack Web Developer and Data Scientist, Basil Systems Inc.
• Post-Baccalaureate Web Technologist, Five Colleges Inc.
• Software Engineering Intern, Pitney Bowes
• Information Services/Information Technology Intern, Nestle Waters

Awards

• Vanderbilt University Graduate Student Travel Grant to Present Research, 2019
• Inroads Scholarship Award, 2016
• 3rd Place, Area Contest, Toastmasters International Speech Contest

Blog Articles

• Speed Up PyTorch by Building from Source on Ubuntu 18.04
• Install CUDA 10.0 and cuDNN 7.5.0 for PyTorch on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
• Install OpenCV 4.0.1 from Source on MacOS with Anaconda Python 3.7 to Use SIFT and SURF
• Deploy a Trained RNN/LSTM Model with TensorFlow-Serving and Flask, Part 1: Introduction and Installations

Fun things

I'm a classically trained pianist and a singer (baritone). My favorite composers are J.S. Bach, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Francis Poulenc. Fun fact: at one point in life I almost became a professional pianist but I decided against the conservatory life. Here's me in concert (I come in at 1:07):

I love hiking and kayaking. I went on my first kayaking trip in Summer 2020 and since then the Vanderbilt ML armada has been terrorizing the rivers of Tennessee. I also enjoy traveling (pre- and hopefully post-COVID) and cooking various cuisines.