CLAIRE HUANG

SOFTWARE / DESIGNER

Hello!

My name is Claire Huang, and I love to tell stories.

Whether it's through a website like this one; through my hobbies of digital art, music/songwriting, writing; or through creating natural language processing models for chatbots, I'm always drawn to the challenge of bottling emotions or experiences. Through my various work with volunteering in underprivileged communities and mental health awareness, I've had the privilege of helping others tell their stories as well.

I currently study at University of California, Los Angeles, where I'm fortunate enough to be among extremely talented and wonderful peers and faculty. My goal is to continue tackling communication problems with machine learning and natural language processing, so if you have anything exciting, just let me know!

MY WORK

AIML Intern at Apple

Siri Video Experience Team

June 2023 - Sept 2023

Top secret :)

Undergraduate Researcher

Professor CJ Kim, Micro and Nano Manufacturing Laboratory

November 2021 - Present

Created a segmentation model to detect cleaner droplet shapes.

Designed a mathematical method for corner detection.

In total, developed a program capable of measuring all types of contact angles from droplet photos to measure the hydrophobic level of surfaces.

COOL THINGS

(at least to me)

High quality bread photo, courtesy of my friend Theo

I was the design lead for IDEAHacks 2023, and I made all of the visuals for the hackathon.

IDEAHaxolotl, one of the bonus designs for IDEAHacks 2023!

A nice flower from UCLA's botanical garden!

The Lego cherry blossom tree - my favorite Lego set to date

just sitting there

Ducks at the Getty museum!

First adventures on an FPGA.

Hand painted Hisuian Zoroark denim jackets!

Jorji the Corgi, my team's IDEAHacks 2023 project!

he's sad :(

Playthrough of FPGA tetris (I'm quite proud of making the red piece)

Every playthrough of the FPGA tetris almost seems like a different painting

A dragonfly in my backyard!

I sewed this frog with a pattern I found online, its name is Forg.

My dad's koi

Cherries from my backyard!

Persimmons from my backyard!

Sunset from my neighborhood.

View from near Grand Central Station (I think).

View from the Empire State Building, the summer after my high school graduation.

Kusama's exhibit at the New York Botanical Garden.

Personally, I really liked this exhibit. Each flower represents a visitor, and over time, the sea of flowers grows until the greenhouse is submerged.

This was also one of my favorite Kusama exhibits, and it's purely because it's my favorite color.

The Space Needle. I didn't think I'd be able to see this every day for a summer.

Mount Rainier from Tolmie Peak, on a hike with friends

Mount Rainier at sunset, absolutely worth the wait. The swarms of mosquitos were brutal, though...

Gray's Crossing, golden hour.

A nice sunset over Tahoe. It's fun to just walk up a little bit, wait until it gets dark, and walk back down.

I brought my camera with me to Tahoe once, and this is what I took pictures of.

Northstar - I was briefly on the ski team, but I think I only started getting better at skiing after I left.

A snowman I made!

A temple on Penghu, off the coast of Taiwan.

From Hoya Xishan, a teahouse bed and breakfast in Taichung.

In Chinese, crab is "xie", so two crabs mean "xie xie", which sounds like "thank you". Or so I was told.

A bridge near Kaohsiung. I don't know what it's called, but it looks pretty!

A peacock near a Buddhist temple in Ukiah. They're so used to humans!

From a Mardi-Gras float maker in New Orleans!

A pigeon made its way into the CVPR 2022 talks.

Vegetarian hotpot with friends!

The best shrimp pasta I've ever made. I have never eaten so much pasta in one sitting in my life.

Making lots and lots of dumplings with friends!

Fun fact - I almost recorded a mini-album before COVID-19 hit. This is not what it would've looked like, but the songs still exist.

It was fun to try and imagine my songs being in a tangible product!

I saw this photo on Cara Delevigne's Instagram and knew I had to draw it! If I remember correctly, this one was drawn quite fast.

I draw different profile photos every month, as a way to practice consistently. I think this was January 2023's profile picture.

I really enjoy stationery, but a lot of it comes in copious amounts of plastic packaging. I wanted to create a worry-free, completely compostable version.

Basically, I designed something that I'd want to use and buy. Unfortunately, it only exists in my mind...

This was the start of my digital art journey. I think this is a screen shot from VIXX's Shangri-La music video. This is the default photo I show people when they ask to see my art.

This drawing is the one that led to my IEEE @ UCLA 2023 Publicity position. I'm very thankful for the opportunities this drawing gave me.

I like to make chatbots for fun, and wondered how I would incorporate them into an app, for example.

Maybe I wouldn't make it this dark nowadays, but I wanted a calming space for myself or others to just talk out feelings and work through them with a chatbot.

July 2022's profile picture, Yeoreum from WJSN. This is one of my favorite drawings; I really like the way her hair turned out.

My mom cut strawberries and brought them to me while I was working on homework, and I snapped a picture before I ate them. There's just something comforting about cutting fruit that reminds me of childhood. Almost like I'm doing this to take care of myself, like my mom took care of me.

Another album idea! Most of these songs were written while on a road trip, so the name is very literal.

I really liked the retro vibe with the vibrant colors, and the map with the places the songs were written really put things into perspective for me.

I sent this to a friend, and he was like "Is this Arizona?" He was right. Thankfully it was my brother driving; I think I was just spacing out at the time.