Eric Zaks

Software Engineer

Hi, I'm Eric! I'm a senior at Tufts double majoring in computer science and math and minoring in economics. I enjoy learning and applying a wide range of technologies to a diverse set of fields, including biology, finance, and robotics. Below you can find out about my work experience, research, projects, and skills. Feel free to connect with me through email or LinkedIn. Outside of work and school, I'm an accomplished cellist and have performed extensively throughout Europe, Asia, and South America. I love to read, exercise, and travel, and I'm always open to new experiences!

Experience

Amazon Web Services
Software Development Engineering Intern

May 2022 - Present

I worked as an SDE on the AWS DataSync team, which is responsible for migrating customer data between on-premise and AWS storage services. My project was to add a customer-facing metric to the DataSync service to calculate and display the number of compressed bytes transferred during migration. I also worked on other internal network metrics.
C++PthreadsJavaTypeScript

Liberty Mutual
Software Engineering Intern

May - August 2021

I worked as a full stack developer on the Architecture team in the Global Retail Markets division at Liberty Mutual. I built and maintained Springboot and Node.js REST APIs with fully functioning endpoints, code, code style, tests, and deployment pipelines to enable developers around the company to quickly stand up their own applications by augmenting these patterns with new capabilities. I also developed proof of concept work for patterns based on Kafka Event-Driven Architecture.
SpringbootReact.jsNode.js

Fairmarkit
Machine Learning Intern

July - September 2020

As part of the Data Science team at a procurement startup in Boston, I improved the vendor recommendation engine by developing ranking models and performing NLP on search queries. I also built trend visualization tools in Python and performed exploratory data analyses to explain patterns in transactional data. In addition, I scraped websites to expand the vendor database and preprocessed data for analysis. All members of the Data Science team were located in Eastern Europe so this internship was done in Russian!
PythonTensorFlowPyTorchJupyterSQLAWS

4G Clinical
DevOps Engineering Intern

May - July 2020

On the DevOps team at a clinical trial software company in Wellesley, MA, I wrote Python scripts to automate common tasks for developers and perform Jenkins tests. I sped up the way Jenkins allocates spot instances in order to reduce the task queue and accelerate build times. I also assisted employees with stack issues and identified ways to reduce AWS spending.
PythonBashKubernetesDockerJenkinsAWS

Barrett Technology
Electrical Engineering Intern

May - August 2019

The summer before college I worked at a robotics company in Newton, MA. I designed the universal power supply for the BURT medical robot that is now included in all shipped devices. I also participated in hardware and software integration testing to uncover bugs. In addition, I developed tests for future products, assessed device performance, and wrote inspection documents and reports.
AltiumSolidworks

Research

Tufts Autonomous-Intelligent Robotics Lab

January - June 2021

I was a research assistant at the AIR Lab, working on the DARPA SAIL-ON project. The goal of my research was to develop algorithms for AI novelty detection systems in open world environments using reinforcement learning and other methods.
PythonJava

Tufts Biomechanics Lab

January - May 2020

I worked on a project to create a skeletal tracking system using Adafruit IMU sensors, an Arduino board, and TensorFlow for limb classification. The tool would be a cheap, precise, and mobile version of existing line-of-sight systems like Microsoft Kinect.
PythonTensorFlowArduino

Projects

Gesture Controlled Drone

March - May 2022

I modified a Ryze Tech Tello drone to track and respond to hand gestures. Two models were used for gesture classification: the general purpose computer vision model MobileNetV2 and the 21 point hand landmark model MediaPipe Hand. In addition to these, the Dlib 68 point face landmark model was used to keep the user's face in frame.
PythonTensorFlowOpenCVMobileNetV2MediaPipe

Bayesian Neural Spike Time Prediction

October - December 2022

I built a generalized mixture of finite mixtures model to predict neural spike times from calcium imaging data provided by the Allen Brain Observatory. When a neuron is activated, its concentration of Ca2+ ions increases, which fluoresces and provides a visual indicator of neural activity. Using this data, we can measure neuronal spikes and their intensities, but noisy visual signals and slow imaging rates make it difficult to infer the exact spike times.
C++RPythonHPC

Computational Protein Design

April - May 2021

I used convex optimization to predict the initial amino acid sequence of a protein given its 3D structure by minimizing the total energy of all pairwise interactions in the chain. Among other approaches, I reformulated the problem in terms of MAP estimation in a hidden Markov random field model, which is a probabilistic graph technique more commonly seen in Computer Vision applications.
PythonCVXPY

Stock Market Trading Bot

October – December 2020

I wrote a deep reinforcement learning based algorithmic trading platform using PyTorch and OpenAI Gym. The model consistently achieved a high Sharpe ratio on a 30-stock benchmark and outperformed classical trading strategies. The model's value network is based on the Rainbow algorithm, which combines several improvements over the vanilla DQN. The agent had access to OHLCV stock data in addition to autocorrelation coefficients, sentiment analysis scores, and several technical indicators.
PythonPyTorchGLoVeGPUHPC

Autonomous Sailboat

September - December 2020

I built a sailboat that navigates on its own using onboard sensors to measure wind direction/speed, location, and heading.
ArduinoRasp. PiPython

Skills

Languages

  • Python

  • C/C++

  • Java

  • JavaScript

  • Matlab

Data Science

  • TensorFlow

  • PyTorch

  • Gym

  • Scikit-learn

  • CVXPY

DevOps

  • Kubernetes

  • Docker

  • Jenkins

  • AWS

  • Bamboo

Frontend

  • HTML, CSS & SCSS

  • JavaScript

  • TypeScript

  • React

  • Next.js

Backend

  • Spring Boot

  • Node.js

  • Django

  • REST APIs

  • MongoDB

Other

  • Russian

  • Web Scraping

  • Git

  • Arduino

  • Agile