Dacheng Shen
🎓 Education
Washington State University, Tri-Cities
Jan 2026 - Present
Ph.D. in Computer Science
University of Southern California
June 2024 - Dec 2025
M.S. in Computer Science
University of Connecticut
Sept 2020 - May 2024
B.S. in Computer Science
Dean's List Honors
💼 Experience
Software Development Engineer
Jul 2023 - Aug 2023
HICOCA Intelligent Equipment Technology
- Managed backend and server maintenance
- Updated framework, improved UI and performance
- Configured DB privileges and security
- Led UI development with 32% improved user satisfaction
🔬 Research
Comparative Narrative Analysis with Claude 3.7 (Research Assistant)
Mar. 2025 - Aug. 2025
- Designed and automated a full Claude 3.7 Sonnet-based LLM evaluation pipeline for 208 narrative pairs under four comparison dimensions (conflict, unique, holistic, overlapping)
- Engineered scalable prompt-based inference using anthropic API and batched output parsing, reducing manual judgment workload by over 90%
- Structured model responses into JSON and human-readable formats to enable systematic cross-model analysis and future human annotation
- Collaborated with faculty and research team on dataset preparation, narrative extraction, and designing metrics for minimizing bias in LLM comparison
OEM Controls Automated Angle Test for AS5
Aug. 2023 - May. 2024
- Led a year-long capstone project to automate Quality Assurance testing for the AS5 sensor system, significantly improving testing efficiency and reliability
- Developed a Python-based control system on Ubuntu to operate a 6-axis robot arm, automating sensor calibration and test procedures with precise "Pass/Fail" feedback and real-time result logging
- Designed and implemented a seamless UI-Backend integration using APIs, replacing the previous client version with a fully automated calibration solution
- Successfully delivered the project, reducing manual testing time by 67% and improving calibration accuracy by 26%, which enhanced overall efficiency and reliability
📚 Projects
Multi-Backbone Transfer Learning for Fine-Grained Solid Waste Classification
Jan. 2025 - May 2025
- Developed a multi-class image classifier for nine waste categories using Python, TensorFlow/Keras, with an 80/20 train/test split and 20% in-training validation for robust model evaluation
- Built a preprocessing pipeline to resize images and applied extensive data augmentation (random crops, zooms, rotations, flips, contrast adjustments, translations) to mitigate overfitting
- Implemented transfer learning by freezing pretrained backbones (ResNet50, ResNet101, EfficientNetB0, VGG16) and adding custom FC layers with ReLU, softmax, L2 regularization, batch normalization, and 20% dropout; trained with Adam optimizer and early stopping over 100 epochs
- Evaluated all models on test set using precision, recall, AUC and F1-score; identified VGG16 as the top performer—achieving highest accuracy and generalization—and selected it as the final model
AI-Driven Travel Assistant Design – FlySmart
Mar. 2025 - May. 2025
- Led a requirements engineering project to design an AI-powered flight booking assistant
- Conducted stakeholder analysis, surveys, and interviews, derived user personas, empathy maps, and categorized requirements
- Created and validated a Figma prototype with features including flight search, visa management, smart alerts, and personalized AI chat interface
- Applied agile methodology with story-driven backlog, sprint-based development roadmap, and formal validation via usability testing and prototyping
Semantic Retrieval and QA System with Weaviate & RAG
Sep. 2024 - Dec 2024
- Built a semantic search pipeline using Weaviate with text2vec-transformers for vector-based brand similarity via GraphQL nearText queries
- Developed a PDF QA chatbot with Streamlit, leveraging PyPDFLoader, ChromaDB, and Hugging Face embeddings in a RAG framework for document-grounded response generation
Large-Scale Sentiment Analysis on Amazon Office Reviews
Aug. 2025 - Oct. 2025
- Cleaned and normalized 200k+ review texts (regex HTML/URL removal, tokenization, stopword filtering, lemmatization)
- Trained TF-IDF (uni + bi-gram) ML models including LinearSVC, Logistic Regression, and Perceptron
- Reproduced and evaluated two GloVe-based representations: 100-d average pooling vs. 1000-d first-10-token concatenation
- Demonstrated that 100-d average pooling generalizes more robustly across unseen reviews
Student Admin Design
Sep. 2023 - Dec. 2024
- Collaborated on a group project, using Figma to design the product model and present the plan to stakeholders
- Developed and implemented the code to bring each Figma design feature to life
- Completed the website development and thoroughly tested all functionalities
Food Ordering App Design
Aug. 2021 - Nov. 2021
- Used Java to build a food ordering app that could generate an invoice with the name and price of the dish and the total price after ordering
- Group leader, used GitHub to share and merge information and parts of what each group member had finished
- Completed a report and made a presentation