Jenna (Je) Yang

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I am a third-year Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science, part of the System-Level Design Group at Columbia University, advised by Professor Luca P. Carloni. Before joining Columbia, I received my M.S. and B.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from KAIST.

Research Interests: Computer Architecture  ·  Heterogeneous Reconfigurable SoC  ·  HW/SW Co-Design Approach

Education

Ph.D. in Computer Science, Columbia University Aug 2023 – Present  ·  New York, NY
Advisor: Professor Luca P. Carloni

M.S. in Electrical Engineering, KAIST Sep 2020 – Feb 2022  ·  Daejeon, South Korea
Advisor: Professor Joo-Young Kim

B.S. in Electrical Engineering, KAIST Mar 2016 – Aug 2022  ·  Daejeon, South Korea
Graduated Cum Laude (GPA: 3.72 / 4.3)
Exchange Student, University of California, Irvine  (Jul – Aug 2019)

Experience

Waymo — Machine Learning Engineer Intern Jun 2026 – Sep 2026  ·  Mountain View, CA
Simulation Team

Google — Student Researcher May 2025 – Aug 2025  ·  New York, NY (Remote)
ML, Systems and Cloud AI Team

  • Developed an agentic AI system with prompt engineering for RTL simulation debugging and verification.
  • Optimized waveform-to-database conversion to generate SQL for signal data retrieval, reducing database size by 18% and accelerating generation time by 65%.

Rebellions Inc. — Research Intern Oct 2022 – May 2023  ·  Seoul, South Korea
AI Accelerator and System Team

  • Implemented a system emulation tool in Python to determine the optimal hardware configuration—number of chips, chip-to-chip topology and bandwidth, memory and computation resources—for real-time inference.
  • Mapped and simulated transformer-based hyper-scale models (BERT, GPT-2, T5) with the system emulation tool.

Awards & Scholarships

Gold Prize, 29th Samsung HumanTech Award (1st in Circuit Design Division) Feb 2023

National Full Scholarship, KAIST Sep 2020

Grand Prize, WISET Female Engineering Program Apr 2018

National Science & Technology Scholarship Mar 2018