Chuan-Zheng Lee

I was a PhD student in electrical engineering at Stanford University from 2015 to 2021. My research interests were in information theory and federated learning. While I was at Stanford, I also took an interest in reinforcement learning, wireless communications, computer networks, technology policy, and engineering education. My advisor was Ayfer Özgür. I received my BE(Hons) degree in electrical and electronic engineering with first class honors from The University of Auckland, finishing studies there in 2010, and my MS degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 2015. From 2011 to 2013, I worked as a signal processing engineer for Aviat Networks in its Wellington, New Zealand office. In summer 2019, I worked as a visiting student researcher with Odalric-Ambrym Maillard in the SequeL team at Inria Lille-Nord Europe, which later became Scool.

This is an archive of my academic page, which was previously at web.stanford.edu/~czlee. My current personal website (which currently doesn't have much on it) is at https://czlee.nz/.

Contact

• czlee@alumni.stanford.edu

Teaching

I'm passionate about and spent a lot of my graduate school career involved in teaching introductory-level engineering courses.

engr 40m

For most of my graduate teaching career, I was involved with engr 40m, “An Intro to Making: What is ee?”

• Co-instructor, summer 2017 (see our class notes)

• Head ta, spring 2016, spring 2017 and spring 2020

• ta, five more times between 2014 and 2018

For this work, I was humbled to be nominated by my colleagues for and to receive two awards:

• James F. Gibbons Outstanding Student Teaching Award, 2016

• Centennial Teaching Assistant Award, 2017

engr 76

In spring 2021, I was a ta in engr 76, “Information Science and Engineering”, for its inaugural offering, alongside Shubham Chandak. My main contribution here was writing the project handouts that constitute the bulk of coursework for the course.

Other courses

I was also a ta for these courses:

• engr 108 (Introduction to Matrix Methods)

• ee 101b (Circuits II)

• ee 102a (Signal Processing and Linear Systems I)

• ee 261 (The Fourier Transform and its Applications)

• ee 263 (Introduction to Linear Dynamical Systems)

• ee 279 (Introduction to Digital Communication)

Publications

C.Z. Lee, L.P. Barnes, A. Özgür, “Over-the-Air Statistical Estimation”, ieee Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 548–561, 2021

C.Z. Lee, L.P. Barnes, W. Zhan and A. Özgür, “Over-the-Air Statistical Estimation for Sparse Models”, ieee globecom 2021.

C.Z. Lee, L.P. Barnes, A. Özgür, “Lower Bounds for Over-the-Air Statistical Estimation”, ieee isit 2021.

C.Z. Lee, L.P. Barnes, A. Özgür, “Over-the-Air Statistical Estimation”, ieee globecom 2020.

• This paper won the Best Paper Award in the Selected Areas of Communications Symposium.

Y. Han, J. Jiao, C.Z. Lee, T. Weissman, Y. Wu and T. Yu, “Entropy Rate Estimation for Markov Chains with Large State Space”, neurips 2018.

• I ran the experiments in section 5 of this paper.

My doctoral dissertation can be found in the Stanford Digital Repository. Alongside the many acknowledgements therein, there are a couple missing: the staff at the Bechtel International Center, and my psychotherapist in Auckland (where I was for the last year of my PhD, during the covid-19 pandemic).