DoangJoo "Alan" Synn

PhD Student in Computer Science @System for Artificial Intelligence Lab, Georgia Institute of Technology

I am a PhD Student in the fields of Computer Science at Georgia Institute of Technology. My research interests span Distributed systems, Cloud Computing, and System for AI. Before I get into PhD program, I worked as a software engineer for 8+ years in various layers of distributed system, machine learning system and cloud computing.

During the period, I was a Research Scientist at Protopia AI inc. which is a AI company mainly tackles for privacy in Austin, Texas. In Protopia AI, I develop and maintain internal frameworks and libraries to support privacy-preserving machine learning with distributed ML frameworks and cloud computing. And I was a AWS Educate Cloud Ambassador of Amazon Web Service. I have profound experience developing distributed frameworks on cloud, models using PyTorch, and deploying models using ONNX.

I received M.Eng and B.Eng in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Korea University advised by Prof. Jong-Kook Kim. My research at Korea University focused on Machine Learning Systems and Distributed Systems.

General Information

Full Name DoangJoo (Alan) Synn
Contact alansynn [at] gatech [dot] edu
Office Klaus Advanced Computing Building 3110
Languages Korean (native), English (fluent), Japanese (beginner)

Research Interests

  • My research interest focuses on developing distributed system and Machine learning system, especially for efficiency and scalability.
  • I have two directions for my research; (1) build scalable system to serve the cutting-edge workload and (2) Build systems for machine learning to accelerate

Education

  • 2022 -
    Georgia Institute of Technology – PhD in Computer Science
    • Advised by Prof. Alexey Tumanov
  • 2020 - 2022
    Korea University – M.Eng in Electrical and Computer Engineering
    • Advised by Prof. Jong-Kook Kim
    • GPA: 4.25 (4.5 scale)
    • Thesis: On Efficient Data Delivery for Machine Learning Systems (ongoing)
  • 2012 - 2020
    Korea University – B.Eng. in Electrical Engineering
    • GPA:3.56 (scale 4.5)
    • on leave from 2016 Spring to 2019 Spring to serve alternative military service

Work Experience

  • 2021 - 2022
    Research Scientist @Protopia AI inc.
    • Austin, Texas, USA
    • CEO: Dr. Eiman Ebrahimi
    • CTO: Prof. Hadi Esmaeilzadeh
    • R&D on:
        Privacy-preserving Deep Learning
        Dev on internal ml framework for privacy
        Dev and maintain Cloud Learning
      published at NeurIPS 2021 Demo.
  • 2019 - 2022
    Cloud Architect
    • Design cloud native softwares and consulted 4 different companies to manage the DevOps infrastructure
    • Field : Cloud Computing, Cloud Applications, Data Pipeline
  • 2020 - 2022
    Amazon Web Services(AWS) Educate Cloud Ambassador
    • The AWS Educate Cloud Ambassador Program is for top-tier cloud educators who serve as ambassadors and evangelists for AWS Educate.
        Consult over university startups
        Support the community to adopt Amazon Web Services Technology
  • 2019
    Server Engineer @Flysher inc.
    • Global #10 social game
        Develop 4 social games and features
        Analysis on data and develop data-pipeline for global #10 social game
        Design and implement unit and simulation testing procedure for business logic
        Develop type checking software to increase type safety(Node.js)
        Develop QA system with virtual agent
  • 2017-2019
    System Engineer @AKA Intelligence inc.
    • Develop and Produce Embedded board & S/W for AKA INTELLIGENCE's social robot, Musio.
        Optimize the MusioOS device driver
        Implement circuit defect detection system
        Stabilize the power consumption among the AP with sleep control
        Design in-house devices for flashing
        Implement in-house software for production stage

Honors and Awards

  • Fellowships
    • Brain Korea 21(BK21) Research Fellowship (2020-2021)
  • Awards
    • Prize Winner Creative Challenge Program @Korea University Center of Teaching and Learning (2016)
    • Samsung Software Friendship @Samsung SDS (2016)
    • Prize Winner Creative Challenge Program @Korea University Center for Teaching and Learning (2015)
    • EE Academic Excellence Honors Program (2012, 2019)

Teaching Experience

  • Spring 2020
    Teaching Assistant for Digital System
    • Undergraduate level introduction to digital system class at Korea University
    • Taught by Prof. Jong-Kook Kim
  • 2012 - 2014
    Teaching experience at KAIST engineering school
    • Develop the software education curriculum for the student bootcamp conducted by Ministry of Science ICT and Future Planning in Korea.
    • Taught software engineering and programming for middle school and high school students.

Technical Projects

  • Privacy-Preserving Deep Learning @ Protopia AI
  • High scalable node.js game server framework @Flysher inc.
    A simple diagram to demonstrate MMO Architecture
    • Game server framework for Typescript developers which provides the basic development framework and many related components, including libraries and tools
    • The former framework, which is pomelo has been deprecated. Therefore, we need to make a new framework based on the former architecture in order to achieve fast and adoptable framework.
  • Musio @AKA Intelligence inc.
    • Musio is a social robot designed by AKA Intelligence, powered by MUSE, a deep learning based AI quantum engine for communication developed by AKA. Using deep learning algorithms, Musio converses with people, recognises objects and also understands people's facial expressions.
    • For two years, I was an engineer at AKA Intelligence inc., where I worked on running various applications on embedded devices. I tackled the problem from various levels of the system stack.
        Develop and Optimize the MusioOS based on Android framework and device drivers to support the system
        Implement circuit defect detection system
        Stabilize the power consumption among the AP with sleep control
        Design in-house devices for flashing
        Implement in-house software for production stage

Publications

  1. NIPS Demo
    Protopia AI: Taking on Missing Link in Inference Privacy
    In Neural Information Processing Systems Demonstrations 2021
  2. Submitted
    Micro Batch Streaming: Allowing the Training of DNN models Using a large batch size on Small Memory Systems
    DoangJoo Synn, XinYu Piao, JuYoung Park, and Jong-Kook Kim
  3. IEEE Access
    Feature Based Sampling: A Fast and Robust Sampling Method for Tasks Using 3D Point Cloud
    Jung-Woo Han, Dong-Joo Synn, Tae-Hyeong Kim, Hae-Chun Chung, and Jong-Kook Kim
    IEEE Access 2022
  4. KIPS
    Num Worker Tuner: An Automated Spawn Parameter Tuner for Multi-Processing DataLoaders
    DoangJoo Synn, and JongKook Kim
    In ACK 2021
  5. KIPS
    A Survey on the Advancement of Virtualization Technology
    JooYoung Park, DoangJoo Synn, and JongKook Kim
    In Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference 2021
  6. KIPS
    SG-Drop: Faster Skip-Gram by Dropping Context Words
    DongJae Kim, DoangJoo Synn, and Jong-Kook Kim
    KIPS 2020