byang.dev

TM-2026 — Los Angeles, California

Computational Physicist & Team Lead

Automatic target recognition end to end — self-supervised pretraining on SAR imagery, distributed training at scale, and models small enough to fly.

Brian Yang

Recent work

  1. [1] SAR-MAE
    Masked-autoencoder pretraining for SAR imagery — physics-aware masking and augmentation rules, calibration-gated evaluation. Masking and augmentation rules for SAR pretraining.
  2. [2] Sidekick
    Self-hosted personal assistant — daily pulse, vocabulary drills, and local LLM inference on home hardware. Self-hosted assistant on home hardware.
  3. [3] Discrank
    Discord chat bot serving 400,000+ users across 4,000+ servers; born at the 2016 Riot API Challenge. Discord bot — 400,000+ users.

Background

B.S. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with a concentration in energy and sustainability. At Applied Research Associates since June 2020 — computational electromagnetics solvers on one side, machine-learning research for synthetic aperture radar on the other — and since August 2023, leading its physics-informed machine-learning group.

I love figuring things out, learning new things, and teaching what I know. Standing interests: computational electromagnetics, software engineering, systems engineering.

Off hours

  1. [a] Collegiate esports
    Starting player, team captain, and shot caller for UIUC League of Legends — top four at the 2018 Collegiate Championships, Big Ten finalist, invited to the NA LCS studio. UIUC team captain — top 4, 2018 Collegiate Championships.
  2. [b] Typing
    Extremely fast on a traditional QWERTY layout. Extremely fast, QWERTY.
  3. [c] Languages
    Native English, fluent Korean; studying Japanese. English, Korean; studying Japanese.