Portfolio — 2025

Alex H.

Applied Statistics & Mathematics at the University of Toronto.
Researching at the intersection of

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UofT
Applied Statistics Specialist
Natural Language Processing
Primary Research Focus
Curiosity-driven learning
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About Me

Statistics is the language through which uncertainty becomes knowledge.

I'm a student at the University of Toronto pursuing an Applied Statistics Specialist and Applied Mathematics Major. My work sits at the boundary between rigorous statistical theory and practical machine learning, with a particular focus on Natural Language Processing.

I'm drawn to problems where mathematical structure meets real-world complexity — building models that are both theoretically grounded and genuinely useful. From Bayesian inference and probabilistic modeling to deep learning architectures, I enjoy the full spectrum from theory to implementation.

Outside of research, I care deeply about clean, reproducible code and the kind of collaborative science that moves the field forward.

Deep Learning NLP Applied Mathematics Bayesian Statistics Data Visualization Probabilistic Modeling
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Education

2023.9 — Present
B.Sc. Applied Statistics Specialist & Applied Mathematics Major
University of Toronto, Faculty of Arts & Science
Honours program focusing on statistical theory, machine learning, stochastic processes, and real analysis. Relevant courses include Statistical Learning, Bayesian Methods, Regression Analysis, and Mathematical Statistics.
Relevant Coursework
Machine Learning & Data Science
Machine Learning · Bayesian Methods · Regression · Mathematical Statistics
Hands-on experience with ML pipelines including classification, regression, neural networks, and Bayesian inference. Projects spanning NLP, image classification, and statistical modeling from first principles.
03

Skills & Tools

Languages
  • Python
  • R
  • C
  • SQL
  • Java
Machine Learning
  • PyTorch
  • scikit-learn
  • Hugging Face
  • NumPy / SciPy
  • Pandas
  • JAX
Statistics
  • Bayesian Inference
  • Regression Analysis
  • Time Series
  • Stan / PyMC
  • Probabilistic Programming
NLP & Deep Learning
  • Transformer Models
  • LSTM
  • Text Classification
  • TF-IDF / Embeddings
  • Fine-tuning LLMs
  • Sequence Modeling
Infrastructure
  • Ubuntu / Linux
  • Git & GitHub
  • Docker
  • Jupyter / Quarto
  • SLURM / HPC
Visualization
  • ggplot2
  • Matplotlib / Seaborn
  • Plotly
  • R Shiny
  • D3.js
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Projects

Project 01
Painting Classification Pipeline
End-to-end ML pipeline for art classification as part of the CSC311 challenge. Built data cleaning, feature engineering with TF-IDF, and trained Logistic Regression models achieving competitive accuracy with a numpy-only inference script for submission.
PythonNumPyscikit-learnTF-IDF
View Details →
Project 02
PaintApp — Interactive Drawing Tool
A feature-rich desktop painting application built from scratch with an intuitive UI for sketching and image editing. Supports multiple brush styles, color palettes, shape tools, and undo/redo history with a clean, responsive canvas experience.
JavaSwingOOPGUIMVC
View Code →
Project 03
Interactive Statistical Dashboard
R Shiny application with interactive ggplot2 and Plotly visualizations. Features adaptive label positioning for vertical reference lines across polynomial and KNN regression modes with dynamic axis scaling.
RShinyggplot2Plotly
View App →
Project 04
Transformer-based Machine Translation (In Progress)
An upcoming project implementing a Transformer encoder-decoder architecture from scratch for neural machine translation. Will cover multi-head self-attention, positional encoding, BPE tokenization, and BLEU evaluation, with training experiments on parallel corpora.
PyTorchTransformerNLPAttention
View Repo →
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Life & Interests

"The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers."
— Richard Hamming

Beyond the mathematics and code, I'm someone who finds joy in understanding how things work at a deep level — whether that's a statistical model, a piece of music, or a philosophical argument. I believe the best researchers are those who stay genuinely curious about the world.

I'm particularly interested in the philosophy of statistics — questions about what probability means, how we should reason under uncertainty, and the epistemology of scientific inference. These aren't just academic questions; they shape how I approach every analysis.

Music has been a central part of my life since I was four and a half, when I first picked up the cello. I spent four years as a member of the symphony orchestra at the High School Attached to Northeast Normal University, which gave me a deep love for ensemble playing and classical repertoire that has stayed with me ever since.

Outside of academia and music, I enjoy playing badminton, exploring new ideas across disciplines, and the occasional late-night debugging session that somehow becomes a learning adventure.

Currently into
🎨 Researching UI & interaction design methods
🎵 Listening to pop music while coding
💬 Distilling chat conversations into LLM system prompts
🔬 Exploring causal inference methods
🏸 Playing badminton
Motto
"All models are wrong, but some are useful."
— George Box
Statistician
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Get in Touch

Always open to research collaborations, internship opportunities, or simply an interesting conversation.