Sunny Yao

Intro

Hi, I'm a software engineer who was first drawn to software development because of how it can multiply productivity. Throughout my academic experience, I have found extreme utility in data science, visualization, and automation. If you're interested, check out some of my personal projects. Additionally, you can contact me at my socials.

Work

I view personal software projects as opportunities to combine creative problem-solving with technical execution. Driven by a desire to address tangible challenges, these initiatives allow me to continuously refine my skills in software architecture, development, and design.

HexFish

This is a free equivalent of Lichess for Settlers of Catan online. This uses significantly optimized replay logs that are 10-20 times smaller than what would be found on colonist.io. Using redis, and google cloud platform, this project handles low latency multiplayer and saves a replay log of the game for future review. In addition, this project hosts a powerful reinforcement learning bot called HexFishBot that can play the game at a high level. This bot uses a combination of Monte Carlo Tree Search and a neural network to evaluate game states. Play Here

Virtual Mouse

This was one of my quarantine projects, during which everyone had to pick up a webcam for their zoom meetings. I decided to make a virtual mouse peripheral that uses computer vision to track hand gestures from a live webcam feed. This uses OpenCV and Google's mediapipe library to track hand landmarks. The model was extremely noisy due to the jittering motions of the landmarks so I had to smooth out the data over the time domain as well as centering on several palm landmarks for it to be suitably accurate to be used as a mouse.

Autonomous Vehicle Intersection Simulation

A traffic simulation project of a futuristic intersection that could accomodate self driving cars. This was part of a collaborative engineering project in which my team developed the schematics of an intersection as well as the traffic light cycles that govern the traffic flow. We combined a roundabout with a conventional intersection to mediate the interactions of hybrid traffic of self driving and manual vehicles. Highlighted in blue are the self driving cars while the manual cars are highlighted in yellow and traverse the roundabout in a counter clockwise direction.

Procedural Island Generator

Part of a software development course, this project was a procedural island generator that created a Voronoi diagram and its corresponding Delaunay triangulation. Islands were then generated onto the resulting mesh with varying topologies. This project was built using Maven.

Discord Bots

Discord Bots using Flask and hosted on Repl.it servers. Now archived and retired due to the lack of a dedicated server. Several versions of these bots were used to automate tasks and provide entertainment in Discord community server. Archive can be found here.

Funhouse Large Language Model

Using 100,000 conversation messages scraped from Discord, I trained a large language model using the GPT-2 architecture. The model was able to generate and continue conversations mimicing the original data. Find the Funhouse LLM deployed here.

Resume

Download Resume

Contact

My socials are listed below. Feel free to reach out to me on any of these platforms.

• GitHub
• Linkedin
• Youtube
• Gmail

Elements

i = 0;

while (!deck.isInOrder()) {
    print 'Iteration ' + i;
    deck.shuffle();
    i++;
}

print 'It took ' + i + ' iterations to sort the deck.';