Education

Computer Science & Business, Economics and Management, B.S. 2023-Present @ Caltech

Executive Committee @ Caltech Student Investment Fund

The Bishop’s School 2019-2023

Work Experience

Summer Intern @ Hillbot Inc

• Working on embodied AI and reinforcement learning
• More coming…

Summer Investment Analyst (AI PortCos) @ Anzu Partners

• Conducted market research for Gen AI-related infrastructure and investment
• Supported portfolio companies with commercial traction, competitive analysis, and top-of-the-funnel efforts
• Led internal optimization projects including product demos and outbound automation software.

Simons Fellow @ Stonybrook University & US Geological Survey

• Applied large language models (LLM) and web-scale data mining to extract casualty statistics from noisy social media on a real-time basis; pending integration into USGS PAGER system.
• Conceptualized and developed entire web retrieval/scraping and language model fine-tuning pipeline.

Research Intern @ UCSD MLPC Lab

• Assisted with experiments on Contrastive Learning and Variational Autoencoders (VAE).
• Partnered with PhD student to develop novel Transformer-based architectures for point cloud recognition and segmentation: 2nd author to paper

Research Intern @ UCSD Supercomputer Center

• Conducted independent bioinformatics research at applying machine learning for designing pharmaceuticals.
• Initiated and completed project applying machine learning techniques to economically and rapidly identify potential treatment drugs to combat cytokine storm attacks in severe COVID-19 patients

Research

Wang, Chenguang, Davis Engler, Xuechun Li, James Hou, David J. Wald, Kishor Jaiswal, and Susu Xu. “Near-Real-Time Earthquake-Induced Fatality Estimation Using Crowdsourced Data and Large-Language Models.” International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 111 (September 1, 2024): 104680. link

James Hou, and Susu Xu. (2022). Near-real-time Seismic Human Fatality Information Retrieval from Social Media with Few-shot Large-Language Models. The 4th Workshop on Continual and Multimodal Learning for Internet of Things (CML-IOT 2022). link

James Hou, Valentina L. Kouznetsova, and Igor F. Tsigelny. Calming the Storm: Identifying Multi-Cytokine Inhibiting Drugs with Machine Learning for COVID-19 Induced Cytokine Storms. Microbiol Infect Dis. 2022; 6(1): 1-7. link

Ding Zheng, James Hou, and Zhuowen Tu. “Point Cloud Recognition with Position-to-Structure Attention Transformers,” arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.02030 [cs.CV]. link

Independently developed state-of-art technique to effectively debias AI language models to mitigate racial related biases through Adapter and loss based methods. Preprint here, link

Honors & Highlights

• Regeneron STS Scholar 2023
• Simons Fellow
• First Tech Challenge World #2
• Finalist in the $100K Bill Gross Prize for Entrepreneurship competition

Co-founder of MaizeTix - Go blue 〽️