Zak Singh
I am currently a PhD student in the Systems Research Group at the University of Cambridge, supervised by Dr. Eiko Yoneki. My research interests include implicit parallelization, interaction nets, equality saturation, and reinforcement learning.
My PhD is funded by the Computer Laboratory's Premium Research Studentship. Previously, I was awarded the Best MPhil Student Prize for the Advanced Computer Science programme at Cambridge for 2021-2022. Before that, I obtained a First Class Honours degree in Computer Science and Management at King's College London, where I was ranked as the top student throughout all three years of study.
You can contact me at zs391[at]cam.ac.uk.
Past Work
I've worked as a startup founder, researcher, and software engineer over the past six years. A few of these experiences are highlighted below.
Research Fellow
2022-2023
- Worked on novel approaches to fine-tuning LLMs to detect and rate a variety of psychosis symptoms in speech to aid in early diagnosis
- Developed data augmentation pipeline to transform healthy speech samples into disorganized (psychotic) speech through the use of a wide array of NLP techniques
- Led build-out of AWS infrastructure for deployment of the first remote patient monitoring platform for psychiatry in the largest health system in NY
Technical Co-Founder
2018-2021
New York
- Provided peer-to-peer mental health services to over 500,000 people across more than 30 countries
- Led 7-person design and development efforts across mobile (React Native), web (React), and backend (TypeScript, Node, Elixir, GraphQL, Postgres, Redis, Kubernetes)
- Raised $2m in venture funding from value-aligned investors to support our mission
Miscellanea
Teaching
I am a supervisor for the second-year Concurrent and Distributed Systems module taught by David Greaves and Martin Kleppmann. The lectures are available on YouTube and are worth a watch if you're interested.
I am also a TA for the graduate-level course Large-Scale Data Processing and Optimization taught by my PhD supervisor, Dr. Eiko Yoneki.
Miniatures
I am building a collection of 28mm English Civil War miniatures. They are, for the most part, sourced from the wonderful Bloody Miniatures. If you live around Cambridge or London, and would like to do battle, please email me posthaste!
The Design of This Website
I've aimed to evoke the style of 17th century print in the design of this site. The font used is known as IM Fell, and is a digitization of a typeface distributed by the earl of Oxford, John Fell, in 1672. You can read an interesting history of the font here.
The graphic ornaments you see scattered across the pages are vector recreations of real printed ornaments and woodcut illustrations from 17th century books. If you are interested in learning more about such early graphic design, there's a book on it freely available online.
Finally, the painting of me at the top of the page was created using an AI model trained on the portraiture of the 18th century artist Thomas Gainsborough.