Derrick Zhen

Email: dzhen1@swarthmore.edu | CV

I'm currently a senior at Swarthmore College studying philosophy and computer science. Here are some questions that interest me:
  • How can Continental philosophy (especially phenomenology) inform software design?
  • What sort of organizational environments and practices better facilitate ethical and participatory software production?
In my spare time I enjoy being in nature, hockey (learning) and cooking.
Profile picture
Taken at Redwood National Forest, OR

Peer Reviewed Publications

  1. We report self-identified ethical concerns of 115 practitioners. We enumerate their concerns and discuss how even relatively powerful software engineers often lacked the power to resolve their ethical concerns. I worked on this paper Summer '22 during a REU at CMU.

  2. We use emerging Riemannian geometry based classifiers and regressors to perform eye-tracking tasks over a 2021 dataset: EEGEyeNet. This was my final project for CS099 (Brain Computer Interfaces).

Some Recent Projects

  1. Final project for CS87 (Parallel & Distributed Systems). We designed, implemented and evaluated a P2P chat network that leverages a hypercubic topology to guarantee log(n) neighbors and log(n) hops for n total peers.

  2. I helped put together the physical and digital infrastructure of WSRN, Swarthmore's oldest student-run radio station, after a prolonged hiatus.

  3. 3 projects from CS91 (Game Systems), including a remake of a retro game, a demake of a modern game and an original game. Made using TIC-80, C++ and 8bitworkshop.

Miscellaneous

  1. Accomplishments & reflections from my gap year (2021-2022), during which I was a full-stack engineer at Kapwing, a cloud video editor.

  2. 3 projects from CS313 (Computer Graphics), including a 3D mesh viewer, a particle system and a tree modeler. These projects were all done in C++ using the OpenGL library.