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zitong

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hi! i'm a soon-to-be 4th-year undergrad 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 cryptography, quantum computing, and ai interpretability.

Deep Learning for Number Theory

25au - present

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

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

Z. 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.

Z. Chen*, S. Badrish*, 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 langgraph ai agent to automate controls monitoring

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

Mathematics