Linden Yuan


Hi, my name is Linden Yuan, and I am a first-year PhD student in Electrical & Computer Engineering at UIUC. My advisors are Prof. Bruce Hajek and Prof. R. Srikant. In May 2021, I graduated from the University of Maryland with a BS in Mathematics (High Honors). One notable project that I have worked on, with Prof. Wai-Tong Louis Fan, studies the spectral gap for the TKF91 and Poisson-indel Markov chains.

Interests

I am interested in machine learning and Markov chains. To study these two areas, I am taking an interdisciplinary approach, drawing upon mathematics, industrial & electrical engineering, computer science, and economics:

Mathematics:
  • Analysis
  • Logic and algebra
  • Topology1 and geometry2
 Industrial & electrical engineering:
  • Optimization
  • Coding theory and information theory
  • Dynamical systems, control theory, and queueing theory
  • Electrical networks3
 Computer science & economics:
  • Automata theory
  • Computability theory and complexity theory
  • Microeconomics

                1Including graph theory
                2Including combinatorics
                3In the sense of this Wikipedia article: Network analysis (electrical circuits)

Awards

National Defense Science & Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship2021—2024
Pays full tuition + $41k per year (selectivity: ~2%).
 
Milton H. Abramowitz Award2021
For "superior competence and promise in mathematics and its applications".
Previous awardees include Fields medalist Charles Fefferman and Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
 
Edgar Krahn Scholarship2017—2021
Awarded for performance on University of Maryland High School Math Competition.
 
ASA Statistics Undergraduate Research Competition (international)2018
Third place, for project Semiparametric mixture regression under symmetric unimodal error distribution.

Publications

Yuan, L., Zhou, L., & Yuan, A. (2020). Semiparametric mixture of regression models under unimodal error distribution. J Stat Theory Pract, 14(3): 1-26.