Paul Chu
About Me
I'm a recent graduate with an MSc in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from ENS Paris-Saclay, originally from Paris, France. I'm trilingual in French 🇫🇷, Chinese 🇨🇳, and English 🇺🇸, and currently in the U.S. on a J-1 visa valid until April 2026.
Currently based in Palo Alto and working as an AI Engineer, I'm passionate about soccer, going to the gym, and creating YouTube vlogs. I'm actively looking for an internship position as an AI/ML Engineer starting in November 2025, and I'm available to start immediately.
My research focuses on applications of fine-tuning LLM embeddings, and I've co-authored papers at Stanford University. I regularly participate in hackathons around San Francisco, love building things from scratch, and am always eager to learn more.
Academic Journey
ISEP — BSc & MEng in EE/CS
Five-year integrated engineering program (Paris)
- • “Grande École d'Ingénieurs” engineering degree
- • First-Class Honours ranked Top 5/220 in my cohort
- • Two-year Preparatory Classes (Maths & Physics) — Lycée Stanislas (CPGE), intensive track
Stanford University — Master's Thesis
Pilanci Lab (EE Department), supervised by Prof. Mert Pilanci
- • Awarded a $15k Stanford Overseas Research Grant.
- • Selected as 1 of 2 from 220+ students for the research program.
- • Co-authored my first research paper about “Randomized Geometric Algebra Methods for Convex Neural Networks”
- • Created video contents: Stanford vlogs documenting my adventure during the year
Stanford Medicine — Research Assistant
Nguyen Lab, supervised by Dr. Mindie H. Nguyen
- • Hepatology research across HBV, HCV, NAFLD, liver cancer & transplant — from epidemiology to clinical trials
- • Global health collaborations (e.g. China, Taiwan, Japan, Spain)
- • Focus on health disparities & ethnicity-related risk factors and outcomes
- • Embedded in a small 3-Stanford-engineer data/ML team (with Mattia and Sovann) alongside doctors & researchers
AIIB — Summer SWE (Data Team), Beijing
First professional experience in China; data platform & analytics work
- • Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) is a multilateral development bank (HQ: Beijing) financing sovereign & non-sovereign infrastructure; mission: sustainable infrastructure to improve social & economic outcomes
- • Highly selective intake: <0.01% acceptance
ENS Paris-Saclay — MSc (MVA)
MVA (Mathematics, Vision, Learning): elite research Master’s (est. 1996), led by ENS Paris-Saclay; co-accredited with Institut Polytechnique de Paris, with École des Ponts & Université Paris Cité. Bridges rigorous mathematics with vision/signal and machine learning, tightly linked to labs & industry
- • Often cited among top programs in Applied Math/AI
- • Core: optimization, probability/statistics, ML/DL, computer vision, NLP, generative models, RL
- • Outcomes: 250+ students/year; strong research & industry placements; annual Internship Forum (companies ↔ labs)
EF — AI Startup School, Paris
Selective program (~40 participants) for technical talent to learn directly from founders how to launch and grow AI startups. Five Monday evening “how-to” sessions + a 48-hour builders weekend finale
- • Europe’s hands-on school for starting an AI company; candid, founder-led sessions
- • Learned from French unicorn founders & industry leaders (e.g., Maki, Argil)
- • Builders weekend: ship in 48 hours and demo outcomes
Y Combinator — AI Startup School, SF
Invited among ~2,000 CS students globally; learned from world-class founders/leaders (e.g., Andrew Ng, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Satya Nadella, …)
- • Main stage: Sam Altman, Satya Nadella, Elon Musk (Zoom), Andrew Ng, Andrej Karpathy, Fei-Fei Li, John Jumper, François Chollet, Aravind Srinivas, Jared Kaplan
- • Breakouts: Dylan Field, Aaron Levie, Suhail Doshi, Varun Mohan, Jake Heller, Tom Blomfield, Sriram Krishnan, Pete Koomen, and more
- • Format: keynotes, fireside chats, breakout tracks, community after-parties
Righ — Software Engineer, Palo Alto
AI team — LLM multimodal projects
- • Founded in 2024, Righ brings together a seasoned team from leading technology companies. Over 80% of the team is dedicated to software and hardware development, with deep AI/ML expertise.
Professional Journey
Experience
AI Software Engineer
Righ
Jun 2025 - Oct 2025
Worked on a multimodal product recommender (image + text + behavior); shipped offline eval +21% precision, +13% TPs; link filter: −12% low-quality at ≥82% precision.
Python, PyTorch, Grounding DINO, Real-ESRGAN, TF-IDF, Vector Search, YAML
AI DevRel Engineer
Mistral AI
Jan 2025 - Jun 2025
Built and deployed Systempromptstral, a scalable web app (Next.js + TypeScript) for system prompt optimization with dynamic few-shot prompting and similarity-based evaluation.
Next.js, TypeScript, Python, Mistral AI API, LLMs
Summer Software Engineer
Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank
Jul 2024 - Sep 2024
Led automation of data extraction from the World Bank Group, creating a Project Insights Dashboard (PID) database and developing ChatPID, an AI-powered web interface for personalized project recommendations.
Python, LLMs, Data Visualization, Power BI, Web Development, Statistics
Research Assistant
Stanford Medicine
Mar 2024 - Jul 2024
Streamlined meta-analyses processes, improving information retrieval for researchers. Developed and managed a system to store and organize information extracted from research papers, creating a dataset for efficient case study analysis.
Python, Data Analysis, Research, Database Management, Statistics
Student Researcher
Stanford (Electrical Engineering Department)
Sep 2023 - Jul 2024
Ran large-scale transfer-learning experiments with GPT-4/BERT embeddings in PyTorch. Compared results from convex optimization vs fine-tuning on IMDb, Amazon Polarity, GLUE → +3.2% avg accuracy, −40% variance across seeds.Co-Authored a reproducible benchmark harness (CIs, seed sensitivity, data leakage checks); released clean code, reports.
Research, LLMs, Python, PytTorch, Benchmark, Convex Optimization
Data Analyst
askR.ai
Mar 2024 - Jul 2024
Conducted cohort analysis to identify user engagement and retention trends, using SQL and Python (pandas). I built dynamic dashboards using Tableau and Power BI to visualize retention patterns and support decision-making. Then applied statistical modeling techniques in R to assess customer lifecycle and churn risk
Data Analysis, Python, Power BI, Tableau, R, Database Management, MySQL
Projects
SkyTrip
SkyTrip is a smart weather-aware flight planner that combines WindBorne weather data with Google Flights pricing to recommend destinations. Our algorithm scores destinations based on weather comfort (30%), flight price (40%), and travel duration (30%), helping you find the perfect trip that matches your climate preferences and budget.
Guess Who's Robot
"LeCopain" is a friendly robot capable of playing the classic board game "Guess Who?" by combining natural language processing, speech interfaces, and robotic control into a seamless, interactive experience
Magic Story Box
Our team developed Magic Story Box, an AI-powered interactive storytelling toy that lets children co-create stories with their favorite characters, entirely on-device. Using Whisper Tiny (speech-to-text), a fine-tuned Llama 3.2 3B model (story generation), and XTTS-v2 (voice cloning of Santa 🎅), we created a magical, privacy-safe toy experience without cloud dependency.
Mistral DOOM
We finetuned Mistral-7B model to make it capable of playing DOOM through visual input alone, utilizing the ViZDoom engine, a prominent tool in visual reinforcement learning. We transformed each game frame into a 32x64 grid, representing game elements in each cell, enabling the LLM to interpret the game via ASCII text.
Media & Awards
Research & Publications
Randomized Geometric Algebra Methods for Convex Neural Networks
Co-authored research paper introducing randomized algorithms to Clifford's Geometric Algebra, generalizing randomized linear algebra to hypercomplex vector spaces. Key application area is fine-tuning LLM embeddings with comparative analysis on robustness of transfer learning.
View Paper
Technical article on Mistral DOOM with Fireworks.ai
Doomed to Code: How we Teamed Up with Fireworks AI at MistralAI Hackathon to Conquer the Shores of Hell
View Article
Technical article on our "Guess Who" robot with Hugging Face
Building an Interactive Guess Who? Robot with Mistral AI and SO-100 Arms
View ArticleHackathons & Projects
Mistral AI Hackathon in SF
San Francisco • Mistral AI Hackathon • Winner
A 24-hour hackathon organized by Mistral AI, in partnership with Cerebral Valley and Shack15, bringing together builders to create AI-powered projects using the Mistral API and models. On March 23rd, 2024, I teamed up with Bhav, an ML researcher from San Francisco, and Umut, an ML engineer from Turkey. Together, we built a "Game Copilot", an AI agent designed to play and demonstrate in-game actions using the classic 1993 video game Doom. Our team leveraged Mistral-7B and Fireworks AI for rapid iteration and last-minute deployment within the intense 24-hour hackathon timeline. We won the firt prize and received $10K+ in cash prizes and credits.
View the DemoConsumer Edge Meta hackathon in Paris
Paris • Meta Hackathon • Winner
The Magic Story Box, the next generation of AI-powered toys that brings storytelling to life through dynamic interaction. Tomorrow's kids won't just hear stories, they'll actively shape them. Whether they want to explore tales with their favorite characters from cartoons or cultural icons, the Magic Story Box adapts to their curiosity. With my team (Ivan, Ali, Thomas, and Karim and I), we won the second prize and received $2,5K+ in cash prizes and credits.
View the DemoMistral AI Game Jam Hackathon in Paris
Paris • Mistral AI Hackathon • Finalist
An in-person AI Game Jam in Paris (PhotoRoom), Jan 24–26, where ~100 participants build a playable game in 48 hours using Mistral AI models. Mentorship and resources from Mistral, Hugging Face, Scaleway, ElevenLabs, Nebius, and Balderton, with $8K+ in prizes and two awards: Jury Prize and Community Choice (Twitch).
View the DemoLeRobot hackathon in Paris
Paris • HF LeRobot hackathon • Winner
Our team: Alexandre, Arthur, Thomas and I, won 2nd place at the Mistral AI Robotic Hackathon, which challenged participants to combine Mistral's open‑source LLMs with SO‑100 robotic arms to build interactive real‑world systems. We built "LeCopain", a robot capable of playing the board game Guess Who? showcased how robotics, LLMs, and speech systems can merge to create engaging, educational, and assistive experiences We won the second prize and received $2,5K+ in cash prizes and credits.
View the DemoYC Agentic hackathon in SF
SF • Hackathon
The AI Coding Agents Hackathon at Y Combinator (Aug 10, 2025) gathered top AI developers to build next-gen coding agents. Teams created tools that generate, adapt, or run code based on human or autonomous inputs. Tracks included web/mobile apps, game creation, reactive agents, and evolving software. Winners earned YC interviews, GPT-5 access, and $200+ in perks from Morph, Freestyle, and Anthropic.
View the DemoContact
I'm always open to opportunities in AI/ML engineering, internships, or collaboration. Feel free to reach out directly: