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Tianang Leng

AI4Sci PhD Candidate @ UPenn UPenn

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Education

  • University : Huazhong University of Science and Technology (U.S. News)
  • Major : Artificial Intelligence
  • GPA : 3.97/4 (Tanscript pdf)
  • Rank : 1
  • TOFEL : 109 GRE : 325

My research interest now lies in the fields of protein-protein interaction prediction and de novo protein design. I am working on developing approaches to harness the invaluable data encapsulated within the metagenome.

Publications

Predicting and generating antibiotics against future pathogens with ApexOracle

Tianang Leng, Fangping Wan, Marcelo Der Torossian Torres, Cesar de la Fuente-Nunez

Here we argue that resource-efficient hybrid RNN deep-learning models can generatively design self-assembling peptides with strong self-organization, underscoring AI’s expanding role in biomaterials discovery.
[Paper]

AI in biomaterials discovery: generating self-assembling peptides with resource-efficient deep learning (Nature Machine Intelligence)

Tianang Leng, Cesar de la Fuente-Nunez

Here we argue that resource-efficient hybrid RNN deep-learning models can generatively design self-assembling peptides with strong self-organization, underscoring AI’s expanding role in biomaterials discovery.
[Paper]

Self-sampling meta SAM: enhancing few-shot medical image segmentation with meta-learning (WACV 2024)

Tianang Leng, Yiming Zhang, Kun Han, Xiaohui Xie

Here we introduce three novel modules for Segment Anything Model (SAM) for efficient few-shot medical image segmentation, experiments on popular abdominal CT and MRI dataset showed average improvements of 10.21% and 1.80% in terms of DSC, respectively.
[PDF] [Code]

Research Experience

  • University of Pennsylvania, Machine Biology Group, Research Assistant    Sept. 2024 - Now
  • I am working with Machine Biology Group on de novo peptide design, under the mentorship of Prof. Cesar de la Fuente.
  • Westlake University, Machine Learning and Computational Biology Group, Research Intern    Sept. 2023 - Mar. 2024
  • I am working with Machine Learning and Computational Biology Group on sequence-based protein-protein interaction predictions and de novo peptide design strategies, under the mentorship of Prof. Jianyang Zeng.
  • University of California, Irvine, Research Intern       Jun. 2023 - Sept. 2023
  • I worked with Prof. Xiaohui Xie at ICS on inventing novel data-efficient few-shot learning approach for Medical Image Segmentation with Segment Anything Model (SAM).
  • Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Research Intern      Jun. 2022 - Aug. 2022
  • I worked with Brain-Computer Interface and Machine Learning Lab on designing fast and reliable EEG-based Motor Imagine algorithms for Brain Computer Interfaces, under the mentorship of Prof. Dongrui Wu.
  • Cambridge University, Remote Intern      May. 2022 - Jun. 2022
  • I worked with Prof. Pietro Liò to overcome the masking issues in Face Recognition during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Awards and Scholarships

  • Freshmen study for merit scholarships (2021)
  • School merit scholarship (top 6%) (2021)
  • National Scholarship (top 1.8%) (2021)
  • School merit scholarship (top 6%) (2022)
  • National Scholarship (top 1.8%) (2022)
  • Outstanding Undergraduates in Term of Academic Performance (top 1%) (2022)

Projects and Contests

Kaggle: Predict Student Performance from Game Play

Utilizing insights from BERT and MAE, we developed a sequence classification model to accurately predict students' performance through a series of gameplay actions, earning us a prestigious bronze medal (top 5.6%).
[Contest Link]

2022 World Robot Contest - BCI Controlled Robot Contest

Utilizing Euclidean Alignment and Independent Component Analysis (ICA), we generated a substantial volume of high-quality data, successfully mitigating the over-fitting issue prevalent in EEG based Brain-Computer Interfaces. Impressively, I secured the 20th position among 283 global teams predominantly comprised of master's and Ph.D. students.
[Contest Link] [Code]

2022 HUST-Cambridge Foundations of Data Science - Masked Face Recognition

By incorporating a lightweight Convolutional Block Attention Module into ArcFace and optimizing the training with challenging images isolated using MCTNN, I successfully honed the network's focus on distinguishing features such as the eyes and hairline, thereby enhancing the performance by a notable 4%.
[PDF]

Undergraduate Innovation and Entrepreneurship Project - Intelligent football game analysis

By adeptly merging a transformer-based tracker with YOLOv5, I successfully developed a system capable of mitigating player and ball occlusion issues, enabling automatic and precise tracking of the small soccer ball at real-time FPS through a whole game.

2022 Robocom Robot developer competition (Detect whether pedestrians are wearing masks properly) - Second class prize

Contribution: I proposed to use MTCNN + Arcface to process pictures sequentially, first extract faces and then identify masks with feature vectors. We got a pretty good result on off-line test set.

Misc

fiancée @ Junyu 🐠