Benjamin Yan

About Me

I am a third-year student at Stanford University, pursuing majors in computer science and mathematics, a minor in creative writing, and a coterminal masters in computer science. I co-teach CS 106S in the Stanford School of Engineering, a survey course on coding for social good. In 2020, I was named a U.S. Presidential Scholar.

My research specialises in applying machine learning to the medical imaging, climate science, and resource sustainability areas, investigating recent advances in meta-learning and deep representation learning. I'm affiliated with the Stanford AI Lab, Stanford Network Analysis Project (SNAP) group, and Medical AI Lab at Harvard Medical School as a visiting fellow. I previously worked on image-to-text models with the Stanford NLP Group, in collaboration with Google AI.

Outside of major study, I love to read and explore literature. I'm broadly concerned with the short story as a phenomological object, its embedding of conscious living experience. A recent fascination has been the lyricism and iconography of queer storytelling, understanding the aesthetics of detail through the frame of cultural, mythological, and amorous semiotics.

Email: bbyan [at] cs [dot] stanford [dot] edu

Pronouns: he/they

Astrological Sign: ♋

Publications

See my Google Scholar page.

Coursework

Some of my favorite classes (listed in no particular order):

• English 190YA: Young Adult Fiction
• English 92: Reading & Writing Poetry
• English 90: Fiction Writing
• English 24Q: Leaving Patriarchy
• English 17Q: 21st Century Science Fiction Odyssey
• English 9CE: Creative Expression in Writing
• PWR 2BRC: Adapting, Rebooting, and Remaking
• CS 109: Probability for Computer Scientists
• Math 63DM: Discrete Modern Mathematics
• Math 108: Intro to Combinatorics & Applications

Recent Watches I've Loved

• Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023)
• Lady Bird (2017)
• Arcane (2022)
• Cunk on Earth (2022)