Zhicheng Huang

LO™!

I am first year student in the Sc.M. of Computer Science program at Brown University, and I received the B.S. degree in Computer Science and Cognitive Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Research Overview

Instead of relying on centralized platforms to manage users` data, I believe in an information ecology where users could easily access, store and make use of their own data. Moreover, the tools people use to achieve this ecosystem should require zero to minimal programming and must contribute to overall conviviality.

I have worked on several projects toward this vision to help non-programmers collect, store, and process their data. These projects span Programming Languages, Human-Computer Interaction, and Systems. Previously, I worked with Xinyu Wang, Tianyi Zhang, and Yan Chen to help non-programmers generate programs to scrape web data with minimal demonstration. Currently, I am working with Nikos Vasilakis to build fault tolerant distributed shell execution and with Jeff Huang on a personal web archiver.

My motivation started when I became the victim of the Leviathan, centralized platforms...

I started translating basketball articles into Mandarin as a volunteer on Hupu.com in 2015, and my efforts led to 1 million views by 2019. However, the platform wiped out all posts before March 2019 without any notice to its users, and I lost access to all of my work and data.

Publications

MIWA: Mixed-Initiative Web Automation for Beter User Control and Confidence.

Weihao Chen, Xiaoyu Liu, Jiacheng Zhang, Ian Iong Lam, Zhicheng Huang, Rui Dong, Xinyu Wang, Tianyi Zhang.
Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST), 2023

WebRobot: Web Robotic Process Automation using Interactive Programming-by-Demonstration.

Rui Dong, Zhicheng Huang, Ian Iong Lam, Yan Chen, Xinyu Wang.
Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), 2022.

Highlighted Projects

Here are some projects I did in various courses or for fun.

Search Engine

In this Major Design Experience (MDE) / capstone course taught by Nicole Hamilton, we work in a team of six to build an entire Internet search engine from scratch in C++.

RateMProfessors

This tool simplifies the process of looking up professors' Rate My Professors page on UM's LSA Course Guide.

Image Colorization

This is the final project for EECS 442, Computer Vision. In a group of four, we implemented a neural network that colorizes greyscale images in Python.

DJ 183

As the final group project for EECS 183, Elementary Programming Concepts, this is a web-based "Guess-the-Song" game written in Python(flask), HTML, and CSS. The permission to use music from billboard, unfortunately, is ended at the end of that semester. To make this game up and running again may require paying for ASCAP or/and BMI license. If you wish to play it again, please consider this.