Hi, I am James Fang!

I am a prospective Master of Computer Science student at UIUC.

Snowy UIUC Night

Welcome to my university. Looking south from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in winter at night. From near to far, Illini Union, Main Quad, Foellinger Auditorium, South Quad, and Bell Tower. Isn't it pretty?

Current Work

I have just launched (www.trialslookup.com), a LLM-based search engine for clinical trials. The goal of this project is to help doctors and patients find clinical trials that are a match based on patient demographics, conditions, and clinical phenotypes. This search engine is much faster and more precise than the outdated ClinicalTrials.gov website, which takes a long time to just query, a longer time to just formulate the search, and much, much more time to sift through the clinical trials that are not a good fit for the patient.

I am concurrently working on PrepStar AI (www.prepstar.io), an interactive AI-based practice exam engine for students in high school. This startup stems from my experiences studying for AP/IB exams in high school, where I really wished that there were more practice materials that would've saved me time. The practice exams are generated with state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) models, calibrated at college-exam level or slightly harder to make sure students are prepared for exams.

I've also been working on Bioimedge (pronounced bio-image), a zero- and low-code platform for computer vision for biomedical and healthcare purposes. I envision this as a B2B startup working with doctors, researchers, and other businesses with needs for biomedical imaging. I am looking for motivated, talented people to join as cofounder / engineeers.

Education

  • Master of Computer Science (MCS), UIUC, Aug 2024 - May 2025
  • Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science, UIUC, Aug 2021 - May 2023

I graduated from Upper Saint Clair High School in June 2021. I was an exchange student at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Lausanne, Vaud, Switzerland from September 2022 to February 2023, pictured on the right.

EPFL Campus

Interests

I am specifically interested in machine learning, specifically computer vision, for bioinformatics and healthcare purposes. My other interests also include:

  • Medical data science (i.e. preprocessing, mining)
  • Deep Learning for Education (Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision
  • General-purpose computer vision (i.e. architectures and training/validation optimizations for time & performance)
  • Algorithmic & mathematical theory (i.e. combinatorics)
  • Web/frontend development
  • Still trying to get better at it, this personal page is my exercise!

Quotes I think about:

"You know, again, it would be great if you were number one in the world, but like, people are gonna respect what you did, and if you are proud in your heart, of the work you did, then you will view this as a positive."

- Dalton Caldwell, on putting everything in as a startup founder on a business / product


"You never lose if you don't quit."

- My good friend Declan from high school