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Andrew Zhu

Teaching computers to play D&D since 2016.

zhudotexezhu.exeme@andrew-zhu.comangzhuCV

NSF Graduate Research Fellow

University of Pennsylvania (2022 - present, Ph.D.)

University of California, Santa Cruz (2018 - 2021, B.S.)

D&D Beyond, Wizards of the Coast (2019 - 2023)

About Me

I'm a Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania advised by Prof. Chris Callison-Burch.

My research interests include natural language processing, programming languages, distributed systems, and more.

I'm also a full-stack software engineer. I'm proficient in all manner of backend, devops, database, and frontend engineering. I strive to make idiomatic, clean, performant, and low-maintenance code — philosophies that are often rare in academia. If you wish to reach out for consultation, please get in touch though any of the contact information listed above.

In my free time, I make all sorts of applications to help people play Dungeons and Dragons online, find a house in Final Fantasy XIV, and whatever else catches my interest.

You can find me lurking in various D&D Discord servers, in Eorzea leading the «kupo?» Free Company, or by shooting me an email (it's 6:05 PM for me right now).

Projects

Click to filter by topic.
Python
TypeScript
TypeScript
JavaScript
C#
C#
Programming Languages
NLP
Distributed Systems
Vue
Angular
AWS
GCP
Dungeons & Dragons
Final Fantasy XIV
Final Fantasy XIV
Kani Logo

Kani

Build AI apps faster and cleaner than ever before.

Kani is a lightweight, flexible, and model-agnostic framework for developing language model applications. Kani helps developers implement a variety of complex features by supporting the core building blocks of chat interaction: model interfacing, chat management, and robust function calling. Researchers, hobbyists, and industry professionals alike can use Kani to accelerate their development.

2023 - current
The Paissa Stack Banner
The Paissa Stack Logo

The Paissa Stack

Look into their eyes.

Built in response to the Final Fantasy XIV housing crisis, the Paissa Stack combines a distributed data collection agent with a low-power central server. It'll broadcast when houses become available on your server, and the data helps us learn about the hidden housing timers.

2021 - current
C#TypeScriptFinal Fantasy XIV
Avrae Banner
Avrae Logo

Avrae

Just roll with it.

Avrae is the world's largest Discord bot designed to help players and Dungeon Masters around the world play D&D together online. Rolling with over 5 million users across over 500,000 Discord servers since 2016.

2016 - 2023

zhu.codes

Getting meta

This site was built using a FastAPI backend and Vue 3 frontend. It's a lot more than just a static site — try and see if you can encounter all of the variations of this page! (Hint: some components are time or location-specific.)

2021 - current
TypeScript
Draconic Language Logo

Draconic Language

Safe server-side user scripting.

The Draconic language is built to enable users to write powerful custom commands in Avrae that run on the application layer, while enforcing limits on resource usage. With a custom interpreter built in Python, safety is enforced through both a runtime watchdog and its type system.
Draconic is used in production to run over 75 thousand user scripts daily. You can see some user creations on the Avrae Alias Workshop.

2020 - 2023
d20 Logo

d20

Oops I made a DSL

d20 is a fast, powerful, safe, and extensible dice engine for D&D, d20 systems, and any other system that needs dice. Built on top of the Lark parser, each roll comes with a rich expression tree that enables applications to have full control over each roll.
d20 is used in production to handle millions of dice rolls each day.

2020 - 2023
AWS Kinesis Tools Logo

AWS Kinesis Tools

The fastest way to iterate on data heuristics in the West.

Built in order to quickly iterate on heuristics and filter a large quantity of events captured for the Avrae NLP project at UPenn, the Kinesis Tools are a blazing-fast (>10GB/min) way to explore a structured dataset.
Contact me for help using these tools for your own data science project!

2022
TypeScript
Dicecloud Tools Logo

Dicecloud Tools

New characters simplified.

The Dicecloud Tools are an old project meant to help users create new characters and manage their spellbooks in Dicecloud with minimal effort.
The Dicecloud Tools are looking for new maintainers!

2018 - 2020
Iris Logo

Iris

An AI-powered virtual assistant.

Built at CruzHacks 2019, Iris combines wearable technology and facial recognition in an AI-powered virtual assistance to help Alzheimer's patients combat memory loss.
Winner: Tech Cares, Best Use of Google Cloud Platform

2019

Publications

2024

2023

2022

Supervised Publications

2024