Portfolio

Being with Aptiv as senior algorithm developer since 2019, I currently work on a L4 autonomous driving project for Motional focusing on the radar processing and perception software development.

Before moving to Germany, I worked for Groupon for 3.5 years as a back-end software engineer in Seattle, USA, and Dublin, Ireland.

In Seattle, I was with the marketing team. For the online e-commerce marketplace companies like Groupon, the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform is de facto, a key tool to drive the sales growth. There I have gained valuable experience in developing web services in a modern, agile software engineering manner. More importantly, I have grown myself by ownerships and collaborating with my team, cross-functional teams, and product managers to deliver impactful features to production. My team owned several scalable, highly available systems to handle millions of traffic per day. My hands-on engineering experience was in two categories: 1) the back-end REST service development with Java and 2) the data engineering work on the Hadoop ecosystem (HDFS, YARN, Hive, Spark) with Scala.

This one was shot when I was attending the Spark Summit 2017 with the team.

In Dublin, I moved to the goods team to support the EMEA merchandise platform. Although the “realtime” performance was not the feature of strength for this application, meanwhile, the traffic was much lower compared to the previous web services I had worked on, I still got plenty of new challenges when developing front-end features with a JavaScript framework and the back-end features with Rails. Yes, kind of “full-stack” experience.

Education

From 2010 to 2015, I studied at the University of South Carolina and obtained my Ph.D. degree in Computer Science. I accomplished research projects on robotics, multi-robot systems, localization, motion planning, and computational geometry by working with my Ph.D. advisor, Dr. Jason M O’Kane.

Below is a picture of me with Dr. O’Kane. Many of those who work on the robotics are familiar with Dr. O’Kane because of his books, “A Gentle Introduction to ROS”.

My research proposed novel algorithms for multi-agent systems. Robots can form various repeated lattice patterns, including squares, hexagons, octagon-squares, etc. by autonomously organizing themselves in a distributed or decentralized manner. (There are some similarities between the communication model of multi-agent systems and V2V communication)

Y. Song and J. M. O’Kane, “Decentralized formation of arbitrary multi-robot lattices,” ICRA, Hong Kong, 2014.URL

Y. Song and J. M. O’Kane, “Forming repeating patterns of mobile robots: A provably correct decentralized algorithm,” IROS, Daejeon, 2016. URL

YCombinator Startup Experience

The coolest engineering work I have done in my life is working with 7 engineers to build a self-driving shuttle in a Y Combinator-backed startup company, Auro.ai, in 2015. The three months of that summer became my proudest memory. I, together with the engineers and 3 founders, spent days and nights working on an electric golf car in a garage at Sunnyvale, California. Finally, we successfully made it drive autonomously!

The picture of three engineers (me on the very left) and three co-founders (in white T-shirts) below was taken in an evening after we tested the autonomous driving shuttle on the Santa Clara University campus (Youtube video).

The picture of me below was taken in front of the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California. We demonstrated our self-driving shuttle in the YC Demo Day Summer 2015. The Auro was highlighted in the news on the Tech Crunch and Venture Beat, etc.