Welcome! I am a fifth-year Computer Science PhD student at Cornell University, where I am advised by Prof. Carla Gomes in the Computational Sustainability group.
My research focuses on developing machine learning techniques for challenging problems in sustainability and agriculture. My work has numerous applications including crop yield forecasting, carbon cycle modeling, vegetation monitoring, and detecting fish farms in the Amazon using satellite imagery. I work with experts in agricultural economics, crop science, plant genetics, and ecology, to develop innovative AI solutions that can benefit their fields.
Because many real-world problems have limited labeled data or weak supervision, my research aims to overcome this using prior knowledge, such as smoothness constraints, spatio-temporal structure, pretraining from unlabeled data, and scientific (process-based) models. On the computational side, my interests include contrastive/self-supervised representation learning (particularly for satellite images and spatio-temporal data), weakly-supervised learning, models for time-series data (such as Transformers and temporal CNNs), knowledge-guided machine learning, and explainable AI.
Previously, I completed a BS and MS at the University of Washington. There, I worked with the Information Theory Lab (with Prof. Sreeram Kannan) on creating faster algorithms for cell type discovery and clustering on single cell RNA-seq data. Before that, I was a part of the Information and Communication Technology for Development lab (with Prof. Richard Anderson), where I worked on designing apps for medical data collection and diagnosis in low-resource clinics.
I have completed internships at Facebook (3 times), Docugami (an NLP/document engineering startup, 2 times), and BitTitan, where I had the chance to work on fascinating problems in machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and software engineering.I created this website from scratch (see source code). Last updated Nov 2023.
Contact/links:
Email: jyf6 (at) cornell.edu
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Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons
