Brian Yang
Computer vision and machine learning for synthetic aperture radar. Los Angeles.
1 · Experience
Group/Team Lead
Applied Research Associates — Cypress, California
2023–present
- Lead the Computational Physical Sciences Physics-Informed ML (CPS PI-ML) group in ARA’s Applied Electromagnetics Division — technical direction, hiring, and budget.
- Business development and capture: led captures for the AFRL/RY Farsight Combat ID program ($300k) and the ARL DEVCOM C5ISR AI-Based ATR program ($2M).
- Led the team that won the DARPA CIDAR Semifinal Challenge.
Staff Computational Physicist
Applied Research Associates — Cypress, California
2020–present
- Multi-node, multi-GPU training frameworks for large automatic-target-recognition models; masked-autoencoder techniques for occluded and under-represented targets and for confuser rejection in SAR ATR.
- Physics-informed AI/ML for ATR across domains under a $24M program; modular ATR framework used to train and test digital-twin designs; presented at the 2026 ATR Working Group.
- Maxwell solvers (BI, FE-BI, ABC, DDM) with extremely large unknown counts — incremental IBC solver reusing >99% of the impedance matrix between runs; MPI/OpenMP optimization on TORQUE PBS and Slurm clusters.
2 · Selected projects
SAR-MAE Physics-aware masked-autoencoder pretraining for SAR — masking and augmentation rules, calibration-gated evaluation.
Discrank Discord chat bot serving 400,000+ users across 4,000+ servers.
Sidekick Self-hosted personal assistant — daily pulse, vocabulary drills, local LLM inference.
subfwd Subdomain forwarding as a tiny SaaS — DNS redirects, email forwards, billing; self-hosted on a Raspberry Pi.
3 · Skills
Modeling PyTorch, masked autoencoders, physics-informed ML, self-supervised learning, NumPy, Matplotlib
Computational EM Maxwell solvers (BI, FE-BI, ABC, DDM), finite elements, CUBIT meshing, radar cross-sections, FEKO, MATLAB
Systems C++, Python, Fortran, MPI (OpenMPI · MPICH · Intel MPI), Intel MKL, gdb · valgrind · gperftools, TORQUE PBS, Slurm, CMake, Linux
Clearance DoD TS security clearance (2021–present)
4 · Education
B.S., physics (energy & sustainability) — University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2018 2018