Zi Yin
Machine Learning  ·  NLP  ·  Information Theory

I work in both theory [statistics/information theory] and engineering [computer systems]. I was affiliated to the Stanford Statistical Machine Learning Group, Stanford Platform Lab, and the Information Systems Laboratory (ISL).

After leaving academia, I became a trader/speculator, mostly expressing my semi-systematic views in commodities, taking flat-price and spread risks across major energy, metals, and agriculture markets. With statistical methods, machine learning, and more recently the new wave of agentic AI, I aim to competitively serve the market and its participants — contributing to better price discovery and more efficient risk transfer.

Research

I work in the areas of machine learning and natural language processing. While I am no longer engaged in frontline large language model research, my earlier work contributed to both academic and industrial applications of language models, including some of the earliest integrations of LLMs into search engines in 2016. I broadly identify with the machine learning research community, particularly COLT, ICLR, ICML, and NeurIPS, and maintain strong interests in statistics and information theory. For a period in the past, I also conducted research in systems and networking.

My research has received recognition in both academia and industry. Data center networking research was featured on the front page of The New York Times, and has led to the creation of multiple startups. In machine learning, my work in natural language processing has been taught in Stanford University's widely attended CS224n course, led by Professor Christopher Manning.

I serve as a reviewer for several major conferences, including KDD, NeurIPS, ICLR, and ICML.

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Publications

Resume

Education

Ph.D. — Electrical Engineering
Stanford University  ·  2013–2018
M.S. — Electrical Engineering
Stanford University  ·  2013–2015
B.Eng. — Information Engineering
The Chinese University of Hong Kong  ·  2009–2013
B.S. — Mathematics
The Chinese University of Hong Kong  ·  2009–2013

Work Experience

Senior Vice President
Futures Trading  ·  D.E. Shaw & Co.  ·  Mar 2019 – Sept 2025  ·  New York, NY
Managed significant amount of risk in major US/EU energy and agriculture markets.
Machine Learning Engineer
Moveworks (Acquired by ServiceNow)  ·  Oct 2018 – Mar 2019  ·  Mountain View, CA
Developed Natural Language Understanding and Intent Modeling services.
Software Engineer (Intern)
Google Cloud  ·  July 2017 – Sept 2017  ·  Sunnyvale, CA
Reinforcement Learning based load balancing for AdBrain TPU servers.
Data Scientist (Intern)
Microsoft Bing Ads  ·  June 2016 – Sept 2016  ·  Sunnyvale, CA
Deep Learning for User Intent Understanding and Ads Recommendation systems [2 US patents and 1 publication].
Data Scientist (Intern)
IBM T.J. Watson Lab  ·  June 2015 – Sept 2015  ·  Yorktown Heights, NY
Statistical methods for user modeling and business analytics [1 US patent + 1 publication].

Media