Zhihan Zhang

I am a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate at the University of Washington Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, advised by Prof. Vikram Iyer, Shwetak Patel, and Gregory D. Abowd. My research focuses on sustainable ubiquitous AI, specifically designing algorithms and AI agents to solve unconventional real-world problems autonomously, including sustainability and health, and fundamentally redesigning the current computing ecosystems to be fully sustainable by taking an interdisciplinary approach that includes emerging materials. My research has been published in top scientific journals (Nature Electronics, Nature Sustainability, Nature Machine Intelligence), and premier CS venues (IMWUT/UbiComp, CHI, NeurIPS), and covered extensively by media, including Nature, IEEE Spectrum. I interned at Google, Microsoft Research, Accenture Labs. I am humbled to be a recipient of the Google PhD Fellowship, the Clean Energy Institute Fellowship, the Heidelberg Laureate Forum Young Researcher. I have also received the UW Bob Bandes Award for Excellence in Teaching, and I created and co-instruct the Sustainable & Ubiquitous AI course.

Prior to joining the Allen School, I did my M.S. in Quantitative & Computational Finance and received my B.S. in Computer Engineering with highest honors from Georgia Institute of Technology, where I was fortunate to work with Thad Starner and Gregory D. Abowd.

Some of my other interests include travel and soccer. I was named the city's best midfielder of the 2018 high school soccer season when I was an exchange student in Texas. When I was in middle school in China, we won the Zhejiang all-province middle school soccer championship in 2016, and I was elected to the all-province team of the season.