University of Pennsylvania

I build AI systems for real users.

Math and CS at Penn, building across AI agents, ad tech, LLM research, and 3D worlds.

Get in touch View resume
Jimmy speaking into a microphone while interviewing an AI educator on a podcast
Jimmy flashing a peace sign beside a friend on a tennis court at night
Portrait of Jimmy Zhong

About

I’m Jimmy, a Mathematics and Computer Science student at the University of Pennsylvania. Over the last two years I have built AI products with real users: an iMessage networking agent, an ad-campaign manager used by paying customers, and a climate-risk model used by more than 6,500 people.

I care about the whole stack, from shader code to the interface a customer sees. Away from the keyboard: squash, tennis, guitar, poker, and travel.

Education
University of Pennsylvania, B.A. Mathematics and Computer Science. GPA 3.81.
Research
LLM self-training, coastal climate risk, and environmental economics.
Languages
English, Mandarin (native), Japanese (conversational)
Based in
Philadelphia, PA
Jimmy in a red Penn polo greeting a guest at the check-in desk of an SF Tech Week event
Organizing an SF Tech Week event for a community-built 3D world
Jimmy lying on a bed beside his ragdoll cat
With Bubu, my ragdoll cat

Experience

AI products across four fields: generative 3D worlds, advertising, website building, and networking.

Jimmy at a lectern in a lecture hall, running a hackathon workshop
Running a workshop and judging at a hackathon
Jimmy with his hackathon team, sitting on red stairs
Competing in a hackathon as team lead
Aug 2026 - Oct 2026

Altverse

Software Engineering Intern, Generation Pipeline

Chrona (chrona.world): a persistent shared world whose assets, buildings, and scenes are generated by its users from text prompts.

  • Standardized the generation pipeline into a serialization layer that chains single assets into persistent, editable scenes
  • Shipped it into the live public world and the LA Tech Week showcase, drawing 10 artists with 10K+ followers each
  • Designed and built personalized 3D interactive worlds for artists with Three.js and Tripo assets, reaching 200K+ views on X
Mar 2026 - Sep 2026

Welta AI

Founding Full-Stack Engineer

AI advertising campaign management (welta.ai). Five-engineer founding team, three paying business customers, ten-plus live campaigns.

  • Architected the multi-agent campaign manager: cross-platform performance review went from 20 manual minutes to a 5-second query
  • Built the LLM-driven creative-generation flow for programmatic ad creative, cutting variant generation from over an hour to 2 minutes
  • Built the platform in Next.js and TypeScript with Python LangGraph agents on Supabase Postgres, integrating the Meta and Google Ads APIs
Jun 2026 - Aug 2026

DeepWisdom (MetaGPT)

Software Engineering Intern

Atoms (atoms.dev): an AI website-building agent with 1.2M monthly visits and 70K GitHub stars.

  • Designed and ran A/B tests routing tailored prompts by user intent, lifting click-through on generated sites by 23%
  • Analyzed a 20,000-user experiment showing style guidance made users 15% more likely to publish, then shipped the feature
  • Built the event-tracking robot for the Atoms experiments, so new tests announce themselves and data queries take half the time
Sep 2025 - Mar 2026

Franklink

Co-founder and Technical Lead

The first AI networking agent native to iMessage.

  • Built the agent on LangGraph with a ReAct loop, Redis for cache and Supabase for storage, deployed on AWS
  • Raised the angel round from a Y Combinator China founding team member and set the technical direction for the team
  • Led the weekly discussions that broke the roadmap into per-engineer tasks and marketing targets, and reviewed progress with the team

Selected work

Five things I built end to end: a painted 3D world, a renderer, a game, a research tool, and a funded product.

2026Real-time ink rendering

World of Painting

A first-person walk inside Along the River During the Qingming Festival: Song-dynasty Kaifeng rebuilt as a 3D world that still reads as ink on silk.

  • Real-time ink pipeline: silk ground cut from the original scan, brush-contour outlines, water drawn as strokes
  • 24 human and 5 animal figure recipes across 13 poses, all true geometry with depth and normals
  • 351 tests; every scene judged by an independent critic loop, 13 rounds so far
Three.jsTypeScriptGLSLVitePlaywright
Source on GitHub
The Rainbow Bridge of Kaifeng rendered as ink on silk, seen from the south-east bank
2026Real-time rendering

Neon Street

A rain-soaked cyberpunk block you can walk through, delivered as one 787 KB HTML file. No asset packs, no server, no dependencies.

  • Hand-written WebGL2 forward renderer, one draw call per frame
  • 132k triangles, 135 placed lights, 48 shaded per fragment
  • 5,500 rain instances lit by the same light set
WebGL2GLSLPythonBlender
Source on GitHub
A rain-soaked neon alley at night, wet asphalt reflecting magenta and cyan signage
2026Browser game

Odyssey: Nobody

A six-act, first-person retelling of Odyssey Book IX, from the lotus-eaters to the blinding of Polyphemus, running entirely in the browser.

  • Six Three.js scenes, each built and torn down with its own lighting and collision
  • Every string switches between Chinese and English instantly
  • 86 voice lines, 96 passing unit tests
Three.jsTypeScriptViteVitest
Source on GitHub
Title art for Odyssey: Nobody, a ship at sea beneath a stormy sky
2024 - 2026Climate research

Migracoast

A coastal inundation and climate-risk model for nine U.S. states, released as an open-source research tool.

  • NOAA inundation rasters, IPCC AR6 sea-level projections, and storm-event records
  • Risk-score time series for major cities, projected from 2020 to 2100
  • 6,500+ users at migracoast.com
PythonGISscikit-learnJupyter
Source on GitHub
Generated inundation map showing projected flooding along a coastline
2025 - 2026AI agent, funded

Franklink

The first AI networking agent native to iMessage. It learns what you need and who can help, then makes the introduction.

  • LangGraph orchestrator routing every message through onboarding, recommendation, networking, or chat
  • Matches on need and value: what you are looking for against what others can offer
  • Uses your email for context (a conference, a course, a hackathon) and finds people doing the same
PythonFastAPILangGraphRedisSupabaseAWS
Source on GitHub
Franklink logo and wordmark
500+ introductions made by the agent
$50Kangel funding
13person team
2,000+messages handled

Off the clock

Courts, slopes, strings, and the occasional long trip.

Jimmy on a squash court in a Tabor Squash shirt, holding a racket toward the camera
Squash at Tabor
Jimmy smiling beside his squash coach
With my squash coach and mentor
Jimmy sitting on a tennis court at Penn after a session
Tennis at Penn
Jimmy singing while playing an acoustic guitar
Playing guitar
Jimmy and a friend parasailing over the sea in Key West
Parasailing in Key West with friends
Jimmy standing on Shichirigahama beach in Japan, looking out at the sea
Shichirigahama, Japan. My favorite place.
Jimmy walking a boardwalk toward snow-capped mountains
Traveling

Research, awards, and leadership

Papers, prizes, and the organizations I belong to.

Start-Up in a Weekend Hackathon, 2025

Won the Hybrid Intelligence Track

A career-counseling agent, taken from idea to a shipped product in 48 hours.

2023

Finalist, Model Entrepreneur Competition

Pitched a marine waste collection robot to the judging panel.

Summer 2024

MIT Beaver Works Summer Institute

Remote sensing, GIS, Python, and machine learning: the same tools my coastal research runs on.

Research and papers

  1. 01

    Verifier-Guided Self-Training for Large Language Models

    How imperfect verifiers steer iterative LLM self-training. Proved in a logistic model that two verifiers with identical true- and false-acceptance rates can drive training in opposite directions, then tested it on Qwen3 and Llama-3.2 with a PyTorch and LoRA pipeline.

    Submitted to AISTATS 2027
  2. 02

    Migracoast

    The research behind the tool in Selected work: a flood-risk model trained on 790K FEMA claims with spatially blocked cross-validation, with coastal error 27% below a linear model.

    Independent research · 2024 to 2026
  3. 03

    The Impacts of Income Inequality on China’s Carbon Emissions

    Presented at the International Conference on Economics.

    Conference paper
  4. 04

    Coastal biodiversity under a warming ocean

    Modeled Massachusetts coastal vertebrate biodiversity under warming and acidification scenarios using CMIP5 climate projections.

    Climate model

Leadership and activities

  • Wharton China AssociationSince Aug 2025

    Sponsorship Chair. Company outreach for the annual Penn Wharton China Summit.

  • Penn Venture LabSince Aug 2025

    Member. Building alongside student founders in Penn’s early-stage incubator.

  • Wharton Hedge Fund ClubSince Oct 2025

    Global Macro Board. Researching and presenting macro trade ideas to the coverage group.

  • TEDxYouth at Tabor AcademyApr to Dec 2024

    Founder and organizer. Secured the license, built the committee, and drew 100 attendees.

Toolbox

What I reach for, and where it has shipped.

Languages

  • PythonMigracoast, Franklink, Welta
  • TypeScriptWorld of Painting, Odyssey, this site
  • Java
  • OCaml
  • C++
  • SQL
  • HTML/CSS
  • LaTeX

AI and ML

  • LangGraphFranklink, Welta
  • PyTorchLLM self-training
  • TensorFlow
  • scikit-learnMigracoast
  • Hugging Face Transformers
  • LangChain
  • Multi-agent orchestrationWelta
  • RAG
  • LoRA/PEFTLLM self-training

Systems and data

  • RedisFranklink cache
  • SupabaseFranklink, Welta
  • AWSFranklink deploys
  • QGISMigracoast
  • PostgreSQL
  • Docker
  • Linux
  • Git
  • pandas
  • NumPy
  • OAuth
  • A/B testingAtoms

Web and 3D

  • Three.jsWorld of Painting, Odyssey, Chrona
  • React
  • FastAPIFranklink API
  • WebGLNeon Street
  • GLSLNeon Street, World of Painting
  • BlenderNeon Street props

Let’s talk about what you’re building.

Recruiting, collaborating, or just curious: my inbox is open.

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