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Stuart Sul

Palo Alto, CA • ssstuartss (at) gmail

Hi 👋, I'm Stuart.

I aim to be both an entrepreneur and a dedicated computer engineer. I develop new products, optimize computer systems, and build teams. I truly love the feeling of tackling new challenges from scratch.

I co-founded Blux (formerly Z.Ai), an AI startup specializing in empowering e-commerce and online content platforms through AI-driven personalization. Blux raised $1.7M+ USD from SpringCamp and Primer Sazze, and personalized over 10 million Korean users' online journeys monthly.

I am now pursuing my Master of Science degree in Computer Science at Stanford University. I'm currently focusing on MLSys research @ Hazy Research (Prof. Chris Ré).

In addition, I professionally play electric guitar and compose music. I have released two albums and have been the lead guitarist and producer for various rock bands since 2008.

Education

Stanford, CA

Stanford University

M.S. in Computer Science

  • Recipient of the merit-based Kwanjeong scholarship ($60,000)
Seoul, South Korea

Seoul National University

B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering

  • GPA: 4.21/4.3 (class rank: 1st)
  • Recipient of the National Science and Engineering Scholarship for Gifted Students (full scholarship)
  • Member of the College of Engineering Honor Society

Experience

Stanford, CA

Stanford AI Lab (SAIL)

Research Assistant @ Hazy Research (Prof. Chris Ré)

Seoul, South Korea

Blux (formerly Z.Ai)

Co-Founder and CTO

  • Co-founded and grew Blux to serve 10M+ monthly end-users with $1M+ in annual revenue; Blux is an AI SaaS startup specializing in real-time recommender systems for e-commerce.
  • Secured $1.7M in funding and received a $10M valuation in South Korea.
  • Recruited, built, and led a team of 15+ engineers.
  • Built lots of recommender models, multi-tanent MLOps architecture (Kubernetes was fun), microservices for data collection and model serving (thank you FastAPI), SDK in 7 programming languages, etc.
Seoul, South Korea

Architecture and Code Optimization Lab, Seoul National University

Research Assistant (Prof. Jae W. Lee)

  • Designed and implemented a novel embedding clustering algorithm in C++, reducing the main memory access by up to 44% in commercial deep learning recommendation models (DLRMs).
  • Resulted in a paper accepted at ASPLOS 2021.
Seoul, South Korea

Music and Audio Research Group, Seoul National University

Research Assistant (Prof. Kyogu Lee)

  • Implemented an audio processing architecture using CNN, cGAN, super-resolution, and the Griffin-Lim algorithm, contributing to a commercial singing voice synthesis project.
  • Performed data labeling on audio and MIDI data with millisecond-precision using Logic Pro and Python, preparing 30+ songs for model training (was fun, but very painful)

Projects

ThunderKittens

Open Source Research Project

  • Helps you write speedy GPU kernels for AI

ELF32 Dynamic Linker for Raspberry Pi

Personal Project

  • Ever wanted to run a dynamic linker on bare metal, and port shared libraries?

Co-Chuck

Personal Project

  • "Code" your music collaboratively online.

SampyoNet

University Team Project

  • Developed a TensorFlow-based deep learning model and React.js-based mobile application for automated gravel quality assessment in concrete manufacturing.

MERCI

Open Source Research Project

  • Fast embedding reduction algorithm for deep learning recommendation models (DLRMs) and other systems with extremely large-scale embedding tables.

LLVM Compiler Optimization

University Team Project

  • Achieved 2nd place among 13 teams in an LLVM optimization competition at Seoul National University.

Homemade Neural Network

Personal Project

  • A deep learning framework written using only native Python (not even NumPy).

Five-in-a-row with AI

Personal Project

  • A game of five-in-a-row, with GUI and an AI opponent.
  • GUI and AI written in native Python.
  • AI implemented using minimax algorithm.