UIUC • Software • Data • Research

Building systems that feel useful, thoughtful, and a little curious.

I’m Arina — a UIUC student working across software engineering, data engineering, machine learning systems, and research grounded in real-world data.

Explore selected work ↘ GitHub ↗

Open to Summer 2027 SWE / Data Engineering internships

Arina Zhou with her budgie on her shoulder

⌁

FIELD NOTE birds keep showing up

Python✦TypeScript✦SQL✦ TensorFlow✦LangGraph✦FAISS✦ AWS✦React Native✦Linux✦ Python✦TypeScript✦SQL✦ TensorFlow✦LangGraph✦FAISS✦ AWS✦React Native✦Linux✦

01 / SELECTED WORK

Things I’ve actually built,
tested, measured, and learned from.

A mix of engineering, ML systems, data, and research. Each project is a short story: problem → decisions → implementation → result.

01 ML systems · performance engineering

Nighthawk

GPU-accelerated acoustic inference for an open-source nocturnal bird migration detection system. I enabled GPU acceleration and refactored the inference pipeline for speed, numerical stability, and reproducible deployment.

25× real-time inference (from 4.8×)

5.2× net speedup

CPU/GPU validated eval workflows

PythonTensorFlowCUDALinux

View Repo ↗

PLACEHOLDER / NIGHTHAWK

PRODUCT UI

02 LLM · RAG · developer tools

AI Engineering Assistant

Repository-aware RAG that indexes source code, retrieves relevant context, and answers engineering questions with structured workflows.

PythonOpenAILangGraphFAISS

View code ↗

PRODUCT DEMO

03 Mobile · accessibility

Accessible Audio-Haptic App

An end-to-end accessibility application that transforms live audio into synchronized haptic feedback, through a modular, event-driven pipeline with low-latency async interfaces between React Native and native Swift modules.

React NativeTypeScriptSwift

04 Data · GIS · research

Chicago Bird Migration

Modular geospatial data pipelines for the Windy City Bird Lab: cleaning and integrating heterogeneous sensor and monitoring data from 50+ sites, generating model-ready features with GeoPandas and Rasterio, and working hands-on with the acoustic monitoring hardware and the birds themselves.

PythonGeoPandasRasterioRaspberry Pi

Ask about this work →

Setting up a bird monitoring station in the field

Raspberry Pi with PoE HAT used for acoustic monitoring stations

A yellow warbler held during bird banding

A gray catbird held during bird banding at a monitoring site

Overlooking the Chicago skyline during a team trip

Scroll for more from the field →

05DATA · STREAMLIT

H1BView

A Streamlit dashboard exploring H1B sponsorship patterns from LCA filings — built to make a dense public dataset actually explorable.

View project →

06MORE

More on GitHub

Open-source contributions, class projects, and other builds — volleyball analytics, habit trackers, and more live there too.

View GitHub →

02 / EXPERIENCE

Learning fastest when
there’s something real at stake.

May — Aug 2026

Software Engineer Intern

Nighthawk Acoustic Detection System · Van Doren Lab / Open Source

Enabled GPU acceleration for an open-source TensorFlow detection system, taking inference throughput from 4.8× to 25× real-time. Refactored the inference pipeline for numerical stability and built automated CPU/GPU evaluation workflows for reproducible Linux deployment.

Aug 2025 — May 2026

Research Software Developer

Accessible Audio-Haptic Application · iSchool, UIUC

Built an end-to-end accessibility application that transforms live audio into synchronized haptic feedback through a modular, event-driven pipeline, with low-latency async interfaces between React Native and native Swift modules.

Jun 2025 — Present

Software & Data Engineering Intern

Windy City Bird Lab & NRES · UIUC, Chicago

Developed modular Python data pipelines to clean, integrate, and analyze heterogeneous geospatial and sensor data from 50+ monitoring sites, automating model-ready feature generation with GeoPandas and Rasterio.

03 / TOOLBOX

What I build with.

Only the tools I’d be comfortable talking about in an interview.

Languages

Python · TypeScript · Java · Swift · SQL · C++ · JavaScript

Data & ML

TensorFlow · FAISS · LangGraph · LangChain · RAG · Model Evaluation

Engineering

Git · Linux · AWS Lambda · API Gateway · DynamoDB · React Native

Currently exploring

Distributed data systems, cloud data pipelines, and GPU performance tuning.

04 / ABOUT

Code is only part of the story.

I’m drawn to systems that connect software to something tangible: acoustic data, ecological patterns, developer workflows, or people trying to get things done.

Outside of engineering, I’ve spent years around volleyball and now an unreasonable amount of time around birds. Both taught me that patience, repetition, and teamwork matter more than making everything look effortless.

“Build things that make someone curious enough to ask the next question.”

05 / EDUCATION

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

B.S. Information Sciences + Data Science, minor in Computer Science · GPA 3.94/4.0 · Expected May 2028

Relevant coursework

Data Structures · Algorithms · Statistics · Data Science · Software Development

LET’S TALK

Have a role, project,
or weirdly interesting problem?

I’m currently looking for Summer 2027 software engineering and data engineering opportunities.

Email me ↗ LinkedIn ↗ GitHub ↗ Résumé ↗