TerenceZhangDigital Portfolio

Research

Ideas I’m Drawn To, Problems Worth Solving

My research work spans assistive sensing, embedded systems, multimodal reasoning, and theoretical machine learning.

Assistive Sensing & Embedded Systems Lab

Research Assistant | with Prof. Anna Hickerson (KGI) | 2025 - Present

UIST 2026
  • Developing a full-functional single-handed assistive controller for accessible gaming and human-computer interaction.
  • Integrating IMU sensing, embedded firmware, on-device models, and FPGA-linked components for robust real-time interaction.
  • Iterating on end-to-end hardware and control pipelines to improve usability, reliability, and deployment readiness.

SeeingEye Multimodal Reasoning

Researcher | with Prof. Jiaxuan You, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign | 2026

NeurIPS 2026
  • Built routing components for the SeeingEye workflow and ran experiments on multimodal reasoning benchmarks.
  • Revised and optimized workflow stages to improve algorithm efficiency, information flow, and evaluation stability.
  • Supported implementation and empirical analysis for agentic multimodal reasoning in text-only LLM settings.

Theoretical Machine Learning

Researcher | with Prof. Zhao Song, Princeton University & Adobe Research | 2025 - 2026.3

  • Studied probabilistic and optimization properties of modern learning algorithms in theoretical machine learning settings.
  • Worked on questions related to representation learning, generalization, and efficiency in large-scale models.
  • Developed mathematical analyses and proof-oriented reasoning for research problems at the interface of theory and machine learning.