Hello! I’m a 4th year at Columbia University studying computer science and linguistics, while also taking classes in mathematics. My academic interests are in probability theory, statistical learning, and theoretical machine learning.

Outside of academics, I like trying new restaurants, playing video games (Brawl Stars, Minecraft, Egg Inc.), playing chess, watching football or basketball, working out, watching cooking videos (even though I don’t cook), and listening to music.

Career

I am an incoming quantitative trader at Jane Street. This past summer, I was a quantitative trading intern at Jane Street in New York City. The previous summer, I worked as a quantitative trading intern at SIG in Bala Cynwyd, PA.

Research

Currently, I am not conducting research. Previously, I was part of the ROAM Lab, conducting deep reinforcement learning research (e.g. PPO) for robotic manipulation.

Before that, I was part of an ongoing research project at Columbia University, studying how we can use machine learning for preeclampsia detection from retinal images. The work was published and presented at the 2023 International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI) here.

Before that, I worked as an intern at Oak Ridge National Lab, using autoencoders to compress neutron spectroscopy data for direct prediction. I presented my results in a poster that you can view here. My work resulted in a publication into the Machine Learning: Science and Technology journal.

Programming

Broadly, I work on web development, tooling, UI/UX, and analyzing and storing data. I’m interested in learning how things work and in writing code that is readable and maintainable. Check out my Github. Below are my favorite…

Languages: Python · HTML/CSS · Javascript · Rust (currently learning)
Frameworks: ExpressJS · ReactJS · Bootstrap · Pug · PyTorch
Tools/Services: VSCode · MongoDB · Heroku · Git/Github · fish shell

Quizbowl

I currently serve as vice president of PACE, a 501(c)(3) non-profit quizbowl organization that runs the National Scholastic Championship (NSC), an annual national high school quizbowl tournament. As vice president, I am the head editor and logistics person of the question set that is used for that tournament.

I am also the vice president of the e-board of Columbia University’s Quizbowl Club, where I am in charge of hosting tournaments. I’m the creator of qbreader.org, including geoword and the Quizbowl Packet Parser.

Learn more about my participation in quizbowl.

Science Bowl

I was the webmaster, organizer, and question writer for the first National Science Bowl League. I formerly taught Science Bowl classes through Summit Scibowl, which I cofounded and managed the website for. I created a popular Science Bowl program to calculate aggregate team and category stats.

I wrote for/helped run the following competitions: 2021 MIT Science Bowl, MOSFET, CCWTWO, MOOSE, and WISC.

Autoencoders

Geoffrey Wu published on 2022-06-07 included in Notes

A blog post explaining the machine learning-premise of my summer research at Oak Ridge National Lab. Sources: https://www.deeplearningbook.org/, https://www.jeremyjordan.me/autoencoders/, and [Youtube] Variational Autoencoders. Definition: An autoencoder is a neural network that is trained to copy its input to its output. An autoencoder consists of two parts: An encoder that produces a latent space representation from input data. A decoder that recreates the input data from the latent space representation. The latent space representation is a new representation of the underlying input data, typically with desirable properties such as having a lower dimension.

Why the USA Needs to Vaccinate the World

Geoffrey Wu published on 2022-05-05 included in Blog

Engineer's Induction

Geoffrey Wu published on 2022-04-28 included in Blog

Engineer’s Induction April 28th, 2022 · 5:34 AM EDT · 566 words What is Engineer’s induction? Engineer’s induction is when you deduce a pattern based on a small number of cases. For example, consider numbers of the form $2^p - 1$, where $p$ is a prime integer. (A prime number is a number that is only divisible by 1 and itself.) Let’s look at the first few primes $p$: $p$ $2^p - 1$ $p = 2$ $2^p - 1 = 3$ $p = 3$ $2^3 - 1 = 7$ $p = 5$ $2^5 - 1 = 31$ $p = 7$ $2^7 - 1 = 127$ All of these numbers are prime.

IOAA: The Sun

Geoffrey Wu published on 2021-11-15 included in Notes

Regularization

Geoffrey Wu published on 2021-11-03 included in Notes

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The Paper Menagerie

Geoffrey Wu published on 2021-06-23 included in Blog

Nine pages rarely have such a deep, strong impact as The Paper Menagerie. This Ken Liu short story centers on the story of Jack, a little boy who was raised by his Chinese mother and American father. We learn that Jack’s mother was picked out of a catalogue and brought to the US, but his dad took good care of his mom; and we don’t learn anything else about his mom until the very end of the story.