Zhexu Alex Jin

Welcome! I am a PhD candidate at the statistics department in University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. I am advised by Dr. Joshua Agterberg.

I spent my undergraduate years in Kunshan, China and Durham, North Carolina, where I recieved my data science degree and graduated with distinction at Duke Kunshan University and Duke University.

In my undergraduate years, I worked with Dr. Dongmian Zou and Dr. Ivan Mura on geometric machine learning and stochastic modeling.

Email  /  Google Scholar  /  Github  /  CV

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Research

I am interested in subspace clustering, spectral methods and geometry related problems in machine learning, such as computational topology. I am also generally fascinated by interdisciplinary problems in data science.

The following is a list of past research projects:

Enriched spatial analysis of air pollution: Application to the city of Bogotá, Colombia
Zhexu Jin, Mario Andrés Velásquez Angel, Ivan Mura, Juan Felipe Franco
Front. Environ. Sci., 2022
[doi] [bibtex] [code]

We used spatial temporal kriging to identify a highly polluted cluster located in the south-west cluster in the city of Bogotá. Within this cluster, we observe a disproportionate representation of people from several vulnerable groups.

Towards Geometry-Aware Cell Segmentation in Microscopy Images
Zhexu Jin, Gaoyang Li, Huansheng Cao, and Dongmian Zou
Neurips 2022 Workshop: Medical Imaging Meets Nuerips
[abstract] [poster]

Proposed to regularize geometry of the segmentation output produced by network using losses inspired by persistent homology We sped up the loss computation via a 1-dimensional simplification and implemented the new loss based on lower star filtration. Benchmarked the proposed method against other commonly used instance segmentation methods

Teaching
uofi Lab/Discussion Teaching Assistant:
  • STAT 107 Data Science Discovery, Fall 2023*
  • STAT 107 Data Science Discovery, Spring 2024*
*: List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent By Their Students

Grading Teaching Assistant:
  • STAT 426 Statistical Modeling II, Fall 2024
  • STAT 426 Statistical Modeling II, Spring 2025

Basically
Blog Posts
More to come!

This guy makes an awesome website.