wd.
Robotics / AI / Engineering

William Deng.
From perception
to action.

Electrical Engineering master’s student at Columbia University, specializing in AI Engineering. Building across robotics, machine learning, and scientific computing.

NEW YORK, NY · COLUMBIA ENGINEERING
01 / ABOUT & EDUCATION

Connecting intelligence and engineering.

My work spans robot perception and manipulation, GPU-accelerated computing, and data-driven systems.

From programming an industrial spray-painting robot to researching sparse matrix algorithms, I enjoy bringing software and engineering together to solve concrete problems.

Columbia University

2026 — EXPECTED 2028

M.S. Electrical Engineering · AI Engineering Specialization

Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

2021 — 2025

B.S. Systems Engineering and Design · Grainger College of Engineering

Secondary field in Autonomous Systems and Robotics. Minors in Computer Science and Statistics.

02 / SELECTED PROJECTS

Engineering in practice.

Spray Robotics

AUG — DEC 2025

Senior Design · UTLX / Marmon Holdings

Programmed a UR10e robot with ROS2 to spray-paint the interior of train tank cars. Built and 3D-printed a test model.

1st Place · Fall 2025 Bernt O. Larson Project Design Award

Robot Object Perception & Manipulation

STARTED NOV 2024

Machine Learning · Computer Vision

Used Linux, CUDA, C, and PyTorch to train machine learning models for object perception and manipulation.

Gesture-Controlled Robot Arm

JAN — MAR 2025

Engineering Open House Exhibit

Built flex sensors to control a six-degree-of-freedom robot arm. Programmed it with C++ and Arduino, and 3D-printed and assembled the frame.

Gaming Armband Visualization

MAR — APR 2024

Acquired live electromyography data from a gaming armband using Arduino and PySerial for an Engineering Open House exhibit.

Live Goal Horn

DEC 2022 — JAN 2023

Scraped live NHL scores with Python, Requests, and Beautiful Soup 4, then triggered team-specific goal horns with Pygame.

OpenFlights Airport Data Finder

NOV — DEC 2022

Implemented breadth-first search, Dijkstra’s algorithm, and PageRank in C++ to explore airport and flight data.

03 / EXPERIENCE

Research meets implementation.

Primarius Technologies

MAY — AUG 2026

R&D Intern, Design Platform · Beijing

  • Researched and implemented GPU-accelerated sparse LU factorization for SPICE circuit simulation and scientific computing.
  • Optimized EDA software interfaces with Qt and C++, and coded Boolean operations for general polygons.
  • Extracted integrated-circuit parameters and simplified them into equivalent models.

MacDermid Alpha Electronics Solutions

MAY — AUG 2025

Engineering Intern · West Haven, Connecticut

Automated data manipulation processes, improving efficiency by over 25% per run. Identified and escalated a corporate database security flaw for company-wide action.

Abotify

MAR — JUN 2024

Data Intern · San Francisco

Collected data for AI advertising.

FORWARD Data Lab, UIUC

MAY — SEP 2023

Research Assistant · Computer Science

Modeled social hierarchies in faculty hiring through graph data mining. Built Neo4j databases and relationship graphs with Cypher, and implemented a Minimum Violation Ranking algorithm in C++ and Python.

04 / TOOLKIT

Tools for building & exploring.

Programming & robotics

C / C++, Python, Java, ROS / ROS2, MATLAB, R, MIPS Assembly, Verilog, LabVIEW, ngspice

Software & ML

Git, Qt, Simulink, NumPy, SymPy, PyTorch, Pygame, pandas, Shiny, dplyr, ggplot2

Data & analytics

SQL, Neo4j / Cypher, WinLIMS, JD Edwards, Minitab, LotusNotes, Excel VBA

Design & technical

Ansys Mechanical, PrusaSlicer, Autodesk Fusion 360, 3D printing, TeX, macOS, Linux, Windows

Languages

English: native · Chinese: fluent, spoken and written · French: proficient, Level 4

Beyond engineering

Piano: Advanced PD Certificate and High School Diploma, American College of Musicians, 2019

05 / CONTACT

Let’s connect.

For research, engineering opportunities, or a conversation about robotics and AI.

[email protected] ↗LinkedIn ↗