Ryan Chen
I'm a computer science graduate student at USC interested in developing cool software. I enjoy tinkering with new technology to create globally relevant solutions.
Experience
Jan 2023 — Jun 2025
Lead Software Engineer
IEEE HKN Honors Society at UCSD
Led an 8-person development team for the membership portal, managing task delegation, sprint goals, and on-time project delivery. Oversaw the full software lifecycle, facilitating standups, code reviews, and retrospectives to ensure quality and velocity.
Jun 2024 — Dec 2024
Software Engineer Intern
Project Falcon (Startup)
Served as the primary software engineer at a seed-stage LegalTech startup, delivering a prototype in just 4 weeks. Built a ChatGPT-3.5-turbo + Langchain chatbot for legal document analysis and developed scalable ingestion and retrieval systems using Pinecone to support heavy workloads.
Mar 2024 — Dec 2024
CS Instructional Assistant
UC San Diego Computer Science Department
Supported 460+ students in Advanced Data Structures, with an emphasis on code optimization and debugging. Worked closely with faculty to enhance course delivery and student engagement.
Skills
JavaScript
TypeScript
React
Next.js
TailwindCSS
Python
Java
C/C++
PyTorch
JavaScript
TypeScript
React
Next.js
TailwindCSS
Python
Java
C/C++
PyTorch
Projects
RL Autonomous Vehicle
June 2025
Developed a custom wrapper around the highway-env intersection scenario to evaluate and benchmark reinforcement learning algorithms for autonomous driving. Implemented a reward structure focused on safety and route completion using Python and Gymnasium. Trained and compared DQN, REINFORCE, A2C, SAC, and PPO, achieving strong results within 200k training steps.
AI for NYT Connections
March 2025
Developed AI agents to solve The New York Times Connections game using Sentence-BERT clustering, Transformer models, and REINFORCE-based reinforcement learning. Designed evaluation strategies against a random-guessing baseline and analyzed performance using metrics like average guesses and Jaccard similarity. Focused on optimizing semantic grouping and decision-making through NLP and RL techniques.
Personal TA
March 2025
Built a personal AI-powered teaching assistant using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to provide fast, context-aware tutoring via the Gemini API. Leveraged Qdrant Cloud and embedding models for efficient context retrieval, and integrated a pre-trained LLM for structured, accurate responses. Achieved high performance with 3.7s average response time and optimized document processing and retrieval speeds over large course materials.
RL-Based Stock Trading Agents
March 2025
Built a custom Gymnasium environment for training and evaluating reinforcement learning agents on real-world stock trading tasks using Yahoo Finance data (2014–2024). Implemented and trained Q-Learning, REINFORCE, and A2C algorithms. Evaluated performance with financial metrics such as return percentage, Sharpe ratio, and maximum drawdown.
HKN Membership Portal
June 2025
Developed a full-stack membership system for HKN’s induction workflows using Django, Svelte, JavaScript, and AWS EC2. Implemented secure authentication, role-based access control, and dynamic dashboards for over 1,000 active users. Designed a microservice-based architecture with integrated CI/CD pipelines to ensure scalability and reliability.
Education
University of Southern California
Master of Science, Computer Science
University of California, San Diego
Bachelor of Science, Mathematics-Computer Science
Let's Connect!
1
yuyou.chen@usc.edu
2
ryan.yychen@gmail.com
Los Angeles, California
