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zitong

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hi! i'm a 4th-year bs/ms student studying cse and math at uw. i like math, sports, running, music, and the one piece.

Food for thought:

what are all the perfect squares ending in 444?

Research

My research interests lie in some non-trivial subspace of theoretical computer science. Tbh, i'm still trying to figure out what that subspace looks like myself. Recently, i've been interested in ai safety / interpretability, cryptography, and quantum computing.

Mechanistic Interpretability

25au - present

Math AI Research Lab • Advisors: Junaid Hasan, Prof. Jarod Alper

Seeing how (shallow) transformers learn (modular) multiplication.

Z. A. Chen*, J. Hasan*, A. Srinivasan*, H. Bandi, J. Alper. "Multiplication Beyond Groups: Stratified Fourier Mechanisms in Transformer Circuits." Workshop on Mechanistic Interpretability, ICML 2026. (Spotlight)

Efficient Auditing for Public-Key Infrastructure

26wi - present

Independent research • Advisor: Prof. Nirvan Tyagi

Finding an efficient way to help end-to-end messaging users detect if or when they get lied to.

S. Badrish*, Z. A. Chen*, A. Tarnavski*, N. Tyagi. "Efficient Auditing for Public Key Infrastructure via Server-Aided Gossiping." Allen School Undergraduate Research Symposium, 2026. (Poster)

Direct Reading Program - Analytic Number Theory

25wi

Washington Direct Reading Program (WDRP) • Mentor: Zawad Choudhury

Spent some time studying arithmetic functions, Dirichlet multiplication, among other things. Presented my findings, and met some goats.

Experience

Lead Teaching Assistant

24au - present

Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science

Discrete Math (CSE 311), Intro to Programming (CSE 122), and Hardware/Software Interface (CSE 351)

Software Engineering Intern

25su

Capital One

Engineered ai agents (before they were cool) to automate controls monitoring

Writing

I love yapping. Mostly write-ups of projects and things i think about.

Notes & Coursework

All courses are taken at uw. Sometimes for a few select cs and math classes I will type out notes in LaTeX. Because they were typed live in lecture, you may find mistakes. Please email me if you do, and I may choose to ignore you. Also shoutout to my goat Duc Vu for the inspo (he does not know who i am and i am parasocial).

Computer Science

  • CSE 599J[Grad] Social Reinforcement Learning
  • CSE 426/526[Grad] Cryptographyundergrad notes·grad notes (incomplete)
  • CSE 434/534[Grad] Quantum Computationundergrad notes
  • CSE 446Machine Learning
  • CSE 422Advanced Modern Algorithmsnotes (incomplete)
  • CSE 421Algorithms
  • CSE 333Systems Programming
  • CSE 312Probability I

Mathematics

  • MATH 403Modern Algebra II (Groups)notes
  • MATH 402Modern Algebra I (Rings)notes
  • MATH 327Intro to Real Analysis
  • AMATH 353PDEs and Waves