matt wang (he/him)

past lives

I received two B.S.'s and an M.S. from the University of California, Los Angeles. I grew up in Toronto, Canada, and still maintain my love of winter sports and poutine.

As a student, I was a research assistant at the Northeastern Probabilistic Programming Lab (and PRL) working primarily on RSDD; the inaugural outreach chair for NeurIPS 2022; wearer of many hats at ACM at UCLA and ACM Teach LA; a software engineering intern at CZI, Facebook, Adobe, AWS, Booz Allen, and AudioNotch; and, one of the first employees of the UCLA Makerspace.

Prior to becoming teaching faculty, I've been doing some sort of teaching for about a decade. As a graduate student, I TA'd three quarters of CS 131: Programming Languages at UCLA (with a focus on building course infrastructure and novel content). As an undergraduate, I taught hundreds of undergrads web development through ACM at UCLA and QWER Hacks, middle and high school classes through ACM Teach LA and BEAM at UCLA, and dedicated a big chunk of my life to student advocacy & institution-building. I also developed and taught various workshops at the UCLA Makerspace. In high school, I taught various formal and informal classes, workshops, camps, and afterschool programs in computer science, robotics, debate, and math.

When I was younger, I had the (admittedly strange) dream job of working for the CFPB or FTC. I'm still interested in a handful of areas surrounding education and health policy, public economics, consumer protection, and antitrust — though I'm far from an expert!

some favourites & recommendations

recently:

• Forever Howlong (Black Country, New Road Album)

albums:

• Acid Rap,
• Bewitched,
• Brat,
• Charm,
• Emotion,
• Faces,
• Heard It In A Past Life,
• Helplessness Blues,
• Heard It in a Past Life,
• SATURATION II,
• Madvillainy,
• NOT TiGHT,
• Random Access Memories,
• Since I Left You,
• Sometimes I Might Be Introvert,
• To Pimp A Butterfly,
• Tradition,
• Without Warning,
• Women In Music Pt. III

books:

• Algorithms of Oppression,
• Because Internet,
• Capital in the Twenty-First Century,
• Crying in H Mart,
• Death At An Early Age,
• Design Justice,
• Homegoing,
• Never Let Me Go,
• Pachinko,
• Paradox,
• Piranesi,
• Poor Economics,
• Stories of Your Life and Others,
• The Food Lab,
• The Memory Police,
• The Remains of the Day,
• The Three-Body Problem,
• Weapons of Math Destruction,
• What If?

food:

carbonara, gochujang pasta, Japanese curry, katsu, sushi, tiramisu, udon

games:

• Antichamber,
• Baba Is You,
• Bloons TD 4,
• Borderlands 2,
• Civilization V,
• Chants of Sennaar,
• CS:GO,
• Doom (2016),
• Hades,
• Inscryption,
• Minecraft,
• Mini Metro,
• Outer Wilds,
• Pokémon Platinum,
• Portal 2,
• Return of the Obra Dinn,
• Skyrim,
• Stardew Valley,
• Super Hexagon,
• The Stanley Parable

movies:

• Arrival,
• Everything Everywhere All at Once,
• Ex Machina,
• Lady Bird,
• Moonlight,
• My Neighbor Totoro,
• Princess Mononoke,
• Strange Brew,
• The Grand Budapest Hotel,
• WALL-E

clickable potpourri:

• City Roads,
• Creating a QR Code Step By Step,
• Exponentially Better Rotations,
• Generating Sudokus For Fun and No Profit,
• Peritext,
• Sound,
• The Evolution of Trust,
• The Largest Vocabulary In Hip Hop,
• The Password Game,
• Visualizing Algorithms