About Me

I am currently a second-year Master's student in Mechanical Engineering (Mechatronics track) at Stanford University. My work is centered around computer vision (low-level and deep learning), mechatronics and control and I am extremely interested in autonomous driving. Prior to joining Stanford, I graduated from Shanghai Jiao Tong University with highest honor. My resume can be downloaded [here].


Education

  • September 2016 - Present
    Stanford University
    Mechanical Engineering - Master of Science (MS)
    Stanford, CA - USA
    • Cumulative GPA: 3.92
    • Computer Vision & Deep Learning courses: CS131 / CS231A / CS231N / CS230
    • Mechatronics courses: ME218 series (Smart Product Design and Its Applications)
  • September 2012 - June 2016
    Shanghai Jiao Tong University
    Mechanical Engineering - Bachelor of Science (BS) summa cum laude
    Shanghai - China
    • Cumulative GPA: 90.39/100 (Rank: 1/184)
    • Undergraduate thesis with Prof. Hong Shen in Experimental and Numerical Investigation of Laser Polishing.
    • Chiang Chen Overseas Graduate Fellowship Awardee (10 nationwide per year)

Work Experience

  • June 2017 - September 2017
    Autonomous Driving R&D Intern
    Momenta.ai - Beijing - China
    • Developed GTA V-based autonomous driving simulation platform in C++ for data collection and algorithm test.
    • Wrote scripts in Python to clean raw data and generate ground-truth labels for training deep learning models.
    • Trained and tested deep neural networks to predict car pose classification, wheel landing points and pillar locations.
    • Calibrated game camera based on 2D and 3D correspondences extracted from GTA V.
  • September 2017 - Present
    Course Assistant
    Stanford University - Stanford, CA - USA

Projects

  • Greedy Layerwise CNN Training for Weakly Supervised Object Localization
    Z. Wang,
    C. Zhang

    • Used global average pooling layer to preserve model’s localization ability and applied greedily layerwise training to improve its ability of extracting image features.
    • Achieved 7% higher precision in classification and 20% better localization than benchmark.
    [Report] [Poster]
  • OpenCV Lane Line Detection for Self-driving Cars
    • Developed software pipeline to detect lane lines in images and videos for self-driving cars using OpenCV.
    • Applied Gaussian smoothing to suppress noise and spurious gradients, ran Canny edge detector and Hough transform to obtain steady and continuous lane lines
    [Github]
  • End-to-end Scene Restoration and Object Removal
    H. Li,
    C. Zhang
    , C. Zhu
    • Designed and proposed end-to-end pipeline for removing unwanted tourists in scenery pictures and videos
    • Implemented person detector using pre-trained HOG in OpenCV with linear SVM to perform pedestrian detection on images and wrote scripts to generate mask for inpainting
    [Report] [Slides]
  • Smart Fit
    C. Zhang
    , J. He, J.W. Suh, S. Juthacharoenwong
    • Designed, built and tested Android-based fitting room assistance system with features of clothes identification, item request, personalized recommendations.
    • Developed Android app with Google Firebase as backend interfacing with Arduino via Bluetooth and RFID.
    [Website] [Github] [Demo]
  • Siege Tank Robot
    J. He,
    C. Zhang
    , Z. Shang, T. Lee
    • Designed, built and tested an autonomous racing robot that navigates through a landscape with sensor system.
    • Implemented hierarchal state machines and PID control with robust embedded code using event-driven framework, state charts, interrupts and SPI communication protocol
    [Website] [Demo]
  • The Island: A First-person Tower Defense Game on Mobile VR
    C. Zhang
    , Q. Yu
    • Developed first-person tower defense game for mobile VR for Google Cardboard using Unity and Google VR SDK.
    • Built 3D terrain and designed main features, such as game logic, special effects, enemy AI, audio and animation.
    • Implemented game features using Unity API in C# with teammate and deployed game on iOS devices.
    [Proposal] [Github] [Demo]