Hi there! I'm Ben, a CS MS student at Stanford University advised by Prof. Jerry Cain. I also did my undergrad at Stanford (2020-2024), completing a BS double major in CS and Math, and a Minor in Creative Writing. The winter of my senior year, I studied abroad at the University of Oxford, with a Tutorial in Creative Writing. In my free time, I enjoy manga and anime, and listening to J-pop, soundtracks, and rock music 🎸.

My name in Chinese is 颜斌 (Mandarin: Yán Bīn). The last name 颜 is a Western Zhou dynasty relic meaning color or face; my first name 斌 collates the Chinese radicals for writing (文) and martial (武), with the combined meaning of literary talent—lol, ironic.

Teaching

I love teaching, and want to help make computer science education accessible and welcoming for everyone! At Stanford, I have the privilege of supervising CS section leaders and teaching introductory programming (Python, JavaScript, C, Assembly languages), web applications, computer systems, Unix OS, and coding for social good.

This upcoming autumn (winter and spring TBD), I'm excited to be teaching:

Previously, I've had the great pleasure of teaching:

My last iteration of CS 106S was super fun as always, and the highest-rated course in the entire CS department that term (when considering courses with >30 students)! I'm endlessly grateful and indebted to all my students, and they've taught me so much.

As an undergrad, I was also a Math Department SUMO peer tutor for two years, holding weekly, deadline-night office hours for MATH 18, 19, 20, 20, and 51 simultaneously.

Education

Writing and Coursework

Writing has saved my life, and honestly, had I not started taking fiction and poetry courses in college, I'd probably not be here right now. The courses I've taken include:

• ENGLISH 9CE — Creative Expression (☃️ Winter 2022, Nina Schloesser Tárano)
• ENGLISH 24Q — Leaving Patriarchy (🌱 Spring 2022, Nina Schloesser Tárano)
• ENGLISH 17Q — 21st Century Science Fiction (🌱 Spring 2022, Melissa Stevenson)
• ENGLISH 90 — Fiction Writing (🍁 Autumn 2022, Georgina Beaty)
• ENGLISH 92 — Reading & Writing Poetry (☃️ Winter 2023, Kai Carlson-Wee)
• ENGLISH 190YA — YA Fiction (☃️ Winter 2023, Nina Schloesser Tárano)
• ENGLISH 190W — Contemporary Women Writers (🌱 Spring 2023, Nina Schloesser Tárano and Elizabeth Tallent)
• ENGLISH 39Q — Charles Dickens (🌱 Spring 2023, Gabriel Wolfenstein)
• ENGLISH 190E — Novel-Writing Intensive (🍁 Autumn 2023, Tom Kealey and Scott Hutchins)
• Oxford Tutorial — Short Stories & Poetry (☃️ Winter 2024, Jennifer Wong)
• ENGLISH 290 — Advanced Fiction Writing (🌱 Spring 2024, Kirstin Valdez Quade)
• ENGLISH 91V — Creative Nonfiction (🐬 Summer, Sterling HolyWhiteMountain)

Other courses at Stanford that I really enjoyed include:

• CS 109 — Probability for CS (🍁 Autumn 2020, Jerry Cain, Lisa Yan)
• CS 110 — Principles of Computer Systems (🍁 Autumn 2021, Jerry Cain)
• MATH 63DM — Modern Discrete Mathematics III (🐬 Summer, Tadashi Tokieda)
• MATH 151 — Probability Theory (☃️ Winter 2023, Jacopo Borga)
• JAPANLNG 1, 2, 3— First-Year Japanese Language Sequence 🎋

Honors

Research

Style-Aware Radiology Report Generation with RadGraph and Few-Shot Prompting

Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) Findings 2023

📝 Citations from Nature, Nature Medicine, ACL, Nature Communications

B. Yan, R. Liu, D. Kuo, S. Adithan, E. Reis, S. Kwak, V. Venugopal, C. O’Connell, A. Saenz, P. Rajpurkar, M. Moor

  Paper     Code  

Learning production functions for supply chains with graph neural networks

AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2025 (AI for Social Impact Track)

🎉 Oral Presentation—Top 5% of Papers

S. Chang, Z. Lin, B. Yan, S. Bembde, Q. Xiu, C.H. Wong, Y. Qin, F. Kloster, X. Luo, R. Palleti, J. Leskovec

  Paper     Code  

Volunteering

• 🌉 Golden Gate Science Olympiad — Event Supervisor for Remote Sensing (2023), Dynamic Planet (2024), Dynamic Planet (2025)
• 🌲 Stanford Science Olympiad — Event Supervisor for Astronomy (2023), Ecology (2024), Astronomy (2025)
• 🏞️ NorCal State Science Olympiad — Event Supervisor for Road Scholar (2024, 2025), Fossils (2024), Geologic Mapping (2024), Meteorology (2025)

Personal

Favorite Manga, Anime, Adaptations

My all-time favorite anime is Jujutsu Kaisen / 呪術廻戦, and my favorite manga is Chainsaw Man / チェンソーマン. I've never seen a movie I liked more than Weathering with You / 天気の子 (2019) or Spirited Away / 千と千尋の神隠し (2001). I also like:

Miscellaneous Facts

• I'm deathly scared of heights, but love rollercoasters to death
• My favorite food dish is 牛肉面 (beef noodle soup), drink is 🍵 matcha latte
• My most-listened-to music artists include 🎶 YOASOBI, Charli XCX, Radwimps, Dua Lipa, Kenshi Yonezu, LiSA, Hashimero, Minami, Glass Animals, Clean Bandit, BTS, and Olivia Rodrigo. Always looking for album or song recommendations!
• I'm bilingual in Mandarin Chinese & English, and learning Japanese currently! I recently finished reading my first manga volume in Japanese, チェンソーマン　12: 鳥と戦争, and my goal is hopefully to read one new volume a week.