Dear Stan community,
I’m Yi Zhang, and I’d like to nominate myself for SGB for a 2-yr term.
My background
I’m an engineer with applied mathematics background by training(Ph.D. in Ocean engineering, M.S. in Applied mathematics, M.S. in Structural engineering, B.A. in Civil engineering). I became a Stan developer in 2017, working with SGB member @billg on a grant collaborated between Metrum Research Group and Columbia University. Since then I’ve also been working with him and @charlesm93 on Torsten, a Stan-based library for pharmacometrical applications. Before joining Stan community I worked on scientific software R&D on commercial products, mainly in areas of large-scale PDE solvers, PDE-constrained optimization, surrogate models, and uncertainty quantification.
Since joining Stan development team, I’ve been mainly focusing on developments of differential equaitons solvers, nonlinear solvers, and parallel computing features, frequently collaborating with contributors such as @wds15, @bbbales2, @charlesm93, among others. Currently I’m also the main developer of Torsten, for which I’ve designed and implemented its own ODE functionalities and parallel framework that incorporated some of the work by other community members. The latest effort in that direction is cross-chain warmup that @bbbales2 and @avehtari proposed.
Outside of development I’m a firm supporter of FOSS model that Stan represents, and contributed to the community in various occasions. I’ve been every StanCon since 2017. Among those events I presented posters(Stan with PDE/StanCon Helsinki, Stan and Torsten parallelism/StanCon Cambridge) and co-hosted tutorials(ODE modeling with Stan, StanCon Cambridge). I was also one of this year’s StanCon organizers, working with @syclik and @Susana_Marquez, before pandemic.
My mission goal as a SGB candidate
I’d like to
- continue support and promote high quality FOSS projects in Stan family, and contribute to their improvement as a versatile statistical inference engine for scientific applications.
- seek opportunities to introduce Stan to new applications and commercial users. In particular, based on my engineering and industry background I’d like to introduce Stan to simulation & design communities that are experiencing deterministic-to-stochastic paradigm shift and yet found a proper tool.
- promote effective use of Stan as well as adoption of Bayesian framework via meetings, workshops, and publications.
- promote Stan to non-English world and facilitate its documentation and literature in other languages.
As a Stan user, I always find it exciting and enjoyable by using the products by our talented developers and users that keep push forward science and software engineering, and I’d be honored to serve the community and guide the project.
Thank you.