About
Career Objectives
My name is Chris Tran. I am a Machine Learning Engineer with industry experiences in Deep Learning, NLP and Computer Vision. I am currently a Computer Vision Intern at Etsy, where I develop Deep Learning frameworks to improve personalization and image-based recommendations. Besides that, I works as a part-time Machine Learning Researcher at Skim AI Technologies, where I apply latest research in Deep Learning NLP to make machines understand human languages better. Projects I worked on include Named Entity Recognition (NER), Document Classification, large-scale Sentiment Analysis and Summarization.
I am pursuing a STEM master’s degree at the University of Rochester, where I receive solid training in Statistics, Machine Learning and Programming. I am proficient in Python and R programming languages, data retrieval and processing with SQL, data visualization with Tableau, Matplotlib and Seaborn. I am interested in working with large datasets, including cleaning, connecting and mining data. I have completed Data Science projects and Kaggle competitions, where I built, tuned and ensembled machine learning models including Regresisons (Ridge, Lasso), Random Forest, SVM, XGBoost and LightGBM. I am very proficient at using PyTorch to build and deploy cutting-egde AI systems to solve NLP and CV problems. More details about these projects can be found below:
I love to read AI blogs, watch YouTube tutorials and listen to AI podcasts. I am learning so much from the AI community, where knowledge is shared to challenge the boundary of computer intelligence. In addition, as an NLP researcher, I frequently publish articles to discuss recent research papers in Deep Learning and open-source projects to apply state-of-the-art technologies in NLP such as BERT and ELECTRA.
Hobbies
Photography
I still vividly remember summer nights during my childhood in Vietnam. My close friend and I lay on my house’s rooftop looking up to the starry night sky. We talked about our dreams, about the vastness of the misterious universe and tried to listen to the sound of planets moving. The Milky Way has become a part of my childhood memories since then. Growing up, I bought my first DSLR camera to capture clear pictures of the night sky. Being under billions of bright stars in a quiet night, I feel calm and I can hear my inner voice.
The Milky Way and fireflies, taken by me at Catskills Mountains, NY
I also made short films about cities I visited to keep beautiful memories of cultures and people I met on the way.
Long Distance Running
I started running long distance in 2016. Since then I have completed several half and full-marathons. Running pushes me to the limits of my physiscal and mental strengths and beyond. My most favorite book is What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami. His book brought me to running, and through running, I can see so much of me in his books.
“As I run I tell myself to think of a river. And clouds. But essentially I’m not thinking of a thing. All I do is keep on running in my own cozy, homemade void, my own nostalgic silence. And this is a pretty wonderful thing. No matter what anybody else says.”
Haruki Murakami — What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
My first half-marathon race, Hanoi 2016