alan tong
I am a post-baccalaureate research assistant for Professor Bekris' Pracsys Lab at Rutgers. I'm interested in robot learning, including reinforcement learning and imitation learning. I also do a little bit of game development in my free time. You can contact me through the email listed below.
projects
Imitation Learning
PRACSYS Lab
May 2025 - Present
- Built imitation learning infrastructure in Python and ROS Noetic to train and test robot policies on the UR5e and Motoman SDA10F robots
- Used MuJoCo to test and train robots in simulation
- Built automated object placement and scene generation tooling for domain randomization
- Built keyboard teleoperation with inverse kinematics and set up GELLO teleoperation framework
- Built a data-collection system that saves human demonstrations as LeRobot datasets
- Collected demonstrations to fine-tune the pi-0 VLA model for the UR5e
Alpha Strive
Personal Project
May 2025 - Present
- Ongoing side-project to reimplement and learn about the reinforcement/imitation learning techniques by applying them to the fighting game Guilty Gear Strive
- Built a C++ frontend to interact with the video game logic and a Python backend to run the AI model and control the training, with communication facilitated by TCP sockets Trained a DQN model to play the game, using PyTorch and Numpy
- Scraped replay data of matches and trained a behavioral-cloned model to play the game
Transfer Learning in Sentiment Analysis
CS439 Intro to Data Science Project
Spring 2025
- Final project for CS439 to identify the efficacy of transfer learning in sentiment analysis
- Conducted literature review of sentiment analysis, learning about lexicons, Naive Bayes, parts-of-speech tagging, aspect-based sentiment analysis, sentence + document sentence-level sentiment analysis
- Scraped data from review platforms (Steam, IMDB, Metacritic) and fine-tuned the BERT models to predict review ratings from text
- Compared performance of the generalist model trained on all data against specialized models trained solely on each platform in a 7-page Latex report
A* Simulation
CS440 Intro to AI Project
Spring 2024
- Built a simulation for an agent pathfinding through a 2D maze using variations of the A* algorithm in Rust
- Evaluated and summarized performance of algorithms in a 6-page Latex report
- Designed a two-tailed t-test for evaluating the difference between Repeated Forward A* and Repeated Backward A*
ILOC Instruction Scheduler
CS415 Compilers Project
Spring 2025
- Built bottom-up compiler IR instruction scheduler in React, NextJS, with a D3.js visualization of the instruction dependency graph, deployed on Vercel
Neural Network From Scratch
CS440 Intro to AI Project
Spring 2024
- Built a feed-forward neural network from scratch using Rust
- Trained model to classify digits from the MNIST dataset and ascii faces, and achieved accuracy of 90.57%
- Evaluated and summarized performance of neural network in a 8-page Latex report
experience
Research Assistant
PRACSYS Lab, Rutgers University
Spring 2025 - Present
- Working with PhD student on an Imitation Learning project
Associate Software Developer
LightRiver Software
Summer 2024
- Worked in a team of 8 on a full-stack single-paged dashboard web-app for monitoring and analyzing fiber-optic networks, using D3, VueJS, Fastify, Prisma, and Postgres
- Built and deployed migration CLI that can create, track, and apply migrations in production databases
- Optimized line graph SQL query to run x50 faster
- Dockerized backend databases for easier local testing
- Scripted a build-system for backend API + developer tools, used in a GitHub actions CI/CD workflow
- Built a simulation CLI tool that generates 1k+ entries for spiked alarm trend DB data to demo dashboards to customers
WebXR Developer
Rutgers Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy
Summer 2023
- Led development in a team of two to build six interactive AR sites for the NJ city of Lambertville's "Flowing Together" walking tour, using AFrame and ThreeJS
- Hosted AR sites on a website built using Vuejs and Nuxt, serving 900+ monthly users
education
Rutgers University New Brunswick
2021 - 2025
B.S. in Computer Science
Summa Cum Laude
B.A. in Leadership and Management
Phi Beta Kappa Honors Society