Lucy Zhao | CS (Honors) & Plan II @ UT Austin 2020

what i’m up to

I just finished 3.5 exciting years at Jump Trading working as a Software Engineer on trading infrastructure and then as a Quantitative Researcher on trading strategy simulation. I am grateful to be a recipient of a fellowship provided by the NSF to support my goals of applying for and pursuing a PhD!

things i’ve done

Previously, I graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science and a B.A. in Plan II Honors from the University of Texas. As part of the Turing Scholars Honors Program, I completed an undergraduate research thesis advised by Greg Durrett as a member of the Text Analysis, Understanding and Reasoning (TAUR) group.

While at UT, I co-founded the UT CS Directed Reading Program, in which upperclassmen and graduate students mentor groups of 3-4 undergraduate students to understand cutting-edge research in various topics. By selecting papers relevant to UT faculty and inviting faculty members to attend reading group sessions, we increased CS undergraduate research participation. This program has now grown to 20+ mentors and 120+ mentees each semester!

I was also a part of Freetail Hackers, as corporate lead and then as president. We organized HackTX, an annual 800-person hackathon for college students hosted at the AT&T Conference Center. HackTX gives students a supportive space to build cool things, learn new skills through workshops and competitions, and connect with industry opportunities.

Research

Understanding Synthetic Context Extension via Retrieval Heads
Xinyu Zhao, Fangcong Yin, Greg Durrett. arXiv 2024.

To CoT or not to CoT? Chain-of-thought helps mainly on math and symbolic reasoning
Zayne Sprague, Fangcong Yin, Juan Diego Rodriguez, Dongwei Jiang, Manya Wadhwa, Prasann Singhal, Xinyu Zhao, Xi Ye, Kyle Mahowald, and Greg Durrett. arXiv 2024.

Learning to Refine with Fine-Grained Natural Language Feedback
Manya Wadhwa, Xinyu Zhao, Junyi Jessy Li, and Greg Durrett. Findings of EMNLP 2024.

Flexible generation of natural language deductions
Kaj Bostrom, Xinyu Zhao, Swarat Chaudhuri, Greg Durrett. EMNLP 2021.

Effective Distant Supervision for Temporal Relation Extraction
Xinyu Zhao, Shih-ting Lin, Greg Durrett. Proceedings of Adapt-NLP: The Second Workshop on Domain Adaptation for NLP (at EACL) 2021.