"Ryan" Zhiyu An

Hi! I'm a PhD student at University of California, Merced, advised by Professor Wan Du. Previously, I completed a BA at UC Berkeley in 1.5 years and started my PhD at age 19.

My work primarily contributes to the safe reinforcement learning community. I improve the trustworthiness of black-box AI models for real-world control and decision-making tasks. I use techniques such as regularized optimization, formal methods, and uncertainty estimation to steer AI agents' behaviors, interpret black-box models, and manage risks from out-of-distribution scenarios; all to make AI safer for users.

As the first author, I have published in DAC, ICLR, BuildSys, and SenSys. I was named Best Paper Award Runner-Up at BuildSys 2023 for my contributions to safe reinforcement learning for HVAC control. As a co-author, I have published in KDD. I have served as a reviewer for ACM SenSys, IEEE IOTJ, T-NSE, etc.

I'm open to job / research / startup opportunities. Check out the rest of this site or CV to learn more, and feel free to reach out!