ZHIHENG (JAMES) WENG

Education

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (U Illinois) Dec 2026

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science + Education (Learning Science) GPA: 3.80 / 4.00

Grainger College of James Scholar Honor Fall 2025 – Present

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Summer 2023

Game Lab Summer School

Courses: Introduction to Time Series Modeling with Applications in Economics and Public Health

Stanford University, Scholar AI4ALL Summer 2020

Immersed in AI through lectures, hands-on research projects, and mentoring activities
Engaged in small-group research projects led by graduate students and post-docs in Computer Science and AI

Siebel School of Computing and Data Science (SSCDS), U Illinois Champaign, IL

Course Assistant (CS124) Aug 2025 – Present

Guide 300 students through problem decomposition on assignments spanning data structures, algorithms, and programming
Identify and address conceptual gaps through weekly office hours; translate complex technical concepts for diverse learning backgrounds

Department of Educational Psychology Champaign, IL

Undergraduate Researcher — Effect of College Education on Social-Emotional Development Spring 2026 – Present

Contributing to a study examining the causal effect of college education on Social, Emotional, and Behavioral (SEB) skill development across a 30,000-person longitudinal dataset
Supporting research design, data organization, and pipeline setup for Causal Forest modeling (AIPW framework) targeting peer-reviewed publication

Undergraduate Research Scientific Advancement (URSA) Champaign, IL

Undergraduate Researcher — LLM-Based Mathematical Equation Relation Extraction Spring 2026 – Present

Completed 100+ annotations for a mathematical derivation graph dataset; contributions support model training for LLM-based equation relation extraction
Contributing to annotation methodology and dataset quality assurance; project targets conference publication

OhMyTSS (Swift) Nov 2025 – Present

Co-Founder · Developer

Integrated Apple HealthKit API to ingest and process wearable workout data in real time, transforming raw sensor streams into readiness and training-load insights with on-device, privacy-first architecture
Diagnose user-reported issues, implement data parsing and validation fixes, and ship stability improvements to active user base

Meeting Minion — AI Meeting Summarizer (Python) Aug 2025 – Jan 2026

Team Lead & Developer, SSCDS, U Illinois

Led full lifecycle development of a production backend system with real users: designed architecture, coordinated cross-functional team, and deployed end-to-end transcription and summarization pipeline
Integrated third-party LLM (Ollama) and WhisperX transcription model with SQLite persistence layer; enforced engineering standards via CI/CD, PR reviews, and pytest suite (64+ tests, 100% pass rate)

Seizure Prediction Wristband — Patented Device (C/C++) 2022 – 2024

Initiator & Team Lead

Built end-to-end ML pipeline for real-world medical application: collected and processed heart rate and humidity sensor data, engineered time-series features, and trained a classification model validated via cross-validation to detect pre-seizure patterns on-device
Managed full project lifecycle from hardware prototyping to algorithm deployment; resulted in registered German utility patent (DE 20 2023 107 669) and peer-reviewed publication in Highlights in Science, Engineering & Technology (2023)

Contests and Competitions