Zichen Zhang

Zichen Zhang

Former RA @ Minji Lab, @ UM-DBI Lab | Co-Founder @ Collage

University of Michigan

I’m a third-year undergraduate student at the University of Michigan, majoring in Computer Science. I’m passionate about training unified foundation models that accept multimodal inputs, including touch, images, videos, language, and audio. I’m enthusiastic about building efficient multimodal models by efficiently fine-tuning pre-trained unimodal models using a limited amount of downstream data and improving unimodal accuracy by transferring representations learned from other modalities.

I’ve designed efficient algorithms that handle large amounts of data, including the MIA-Sort algorithm, and I was fortunate to be advised by Professor Minji Kim at the Minji Lab. I also implemented a study to find factors influencing Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) system’s performance on people with physical impairments, and I was honored to be advised by Dr. Jane Huggins at the Direct Brain Interface (UM-DBI) Laboratory.

I’m also interested in entrepreneurship and web technologies. I co-founded Collage, an EdTech startup to assist students with course scheduling using LLM agents, and I’m currently leading the tech team as its CTO. Follow our LinkedIn for more information.

📢 Feel free to contact me at zhangzzc@umich.edu. I’m always open to a coffee chat.

🎨 View my Chinese calligraphy and photography works here!

Interests
  • Unified foundation models
  • Efficiently fine-tuning using little downstream data
  • Transfer learning from other modalities
Education
  • B.S. in Computer Science, Present

    University of Michigan

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