Benjamin Yan

🎨 About Me

Hi! I'm Benjamin Yan (颜斌), a co-term MS student in computer science (AI track) at Stanford University. I recently graduated from Stanford with BSs in computer science and mathematics, and a minor in creative writing (prose concentration).

At Stanford University, I teach CS 106S (cs106s.stanford.edu), work as a SUMO Tutor for the Math Department (MATH 18-21,51), and am involved with CS + Social Good, Math Organization, and Stanford & Golden Gate SciOly. During the 2024 winter term, I was in the United Kingdom as a visiting student at University of Oxford, Brasenose College, completing an intensive creative writing tutorial in short stories and poetry. In 2020, I was named a U.S. Presidential Scholar, awarded to 161 graduating seniors nationwide.

I've been a SWE intern at NVIDIA, and have been involved with ML research in Prof. Jure Leskovec's Stanford Network Analysis Project (SNAP) Group, Prof. Andrew Ng's Stanford ML Group, the Stanford NLP Group, Prof. Diyi Yang's Stanford Social and Language Technologies (SALT) Lab, and Prof. Pranav Rajpurkar's Lab at Harvard Medical School—with a first-author paper publication at EMNLP, one of the leading conferences in natural language processing (NLP) research. My research interests include (1) AI & NLP for social good, (2) visual large language models (LLMs) for healthcare, and (3) global methane emissions mapping.

This summer, I'm working as a graduate research intern in the Climate & Ecosystems Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL), a US Department of Energy laboratory. I'll be using ML to model temporal dynamics in Earth's biogeochemical cycles. In my free time, I enjoy watching anime, exploring the Oxford English Dictionary, riding big tall scary rollercoasters, and trying to learn Japanese.

Email: bbyan [at] stanford [dot] edu

✏️ Featured Works

📝 Publications

† indicates equal senior authorship

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

EMNLP 2023 (Findings, Long Papers)

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

MRI Brain Tumor Segmentation Using Deep Encoder-Decoder Convolutional Neural Networks

MICCAI International BrainLesion Workshop (Conference Paper), 2021

Yan, B.B., Wei Y., Jagtap, J.M.M,. Moassefi, M., Garcia D.V.V., Singh Y., Vahdati S., Faghani, S., Erickson, B.J., Conte, G.M.

🖼️ Presentations

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

EMNLP Main Conference, December 2023, Singapore

Percolation, Phase Transitions, and Global Connectivity in Lattices

Stanford Math Directed Reading Program (DRP) Colloquium, June 2023, Stanford CA

📔 Creative Writing

What makes a light bisexual (poem)

Stanford English and Creative Writing Senior Anthology, June 2024

Twin Prime Conjecture (novel manuscript)

A 94,000-word work of fiction written entirely in one month for NaNoWriMo, Nov 2023

📚 My Bookshelf

• Sea of Tranquility (2022), Emily St. John Mandel
• Normal People (2018), Sally Rooney
• The Idiot (2017), Elif Batuman
• On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019), Ocean Vuong
• A Visit from the Goon Squad (2011), Jennifer Egan
• My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2019), Ottessa Moshfegh
• The Guest (2023), Emma Cline
• Fates and Furies (2015), Lauren Groff
• Interpreter of Maladies (1999), Jhumpa Lahiri
• American Prometheus (2005), Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin

🎥 Movies and Anime I Love

• 天気の子 / Weathering With You (2019)
• 君の名は / Your Name (2016)
• Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
• Inside Out (2015)
• 千と千尋の神隠し / Spirited Away (2001)
• 鬼滅の刃 / Demon Slayer: Kimetsu No Yaiba