About
I'm Ren Yi (任一), a master's student in Digital Humanities at EPFL. I enjoy applying LLM and AI systems to real-world tasks for human good.
I own projects end-to-end with responsibility and pride — from system design and implementation to evaluation — working through each obstacle along the way, with research taste and engineering rigor. Everything is open-sourced on my GitHub.
I care about real human connections. I also value simple, effective and human-centered technology. My preferred work flow is - understand the domain, collaborate with the people it affects, and evaluate the system for future improvements. I believe the human-centered workflow won't go out of style.
Research & Projects
On-device Medical Chatbot for Nurse-Midwives
Feb 2026 – PresentResearcher & Engineer · D-tree International, Zanzibar, Tanzania
Built an on-device medical chatbot aiming to provide real-time, evidence-based, and locally relevant information to nurse-midwives — running fully offline on edge devices in low-connectivity settings. Deployed Google Gemma 4 E4B (int4) with RAG on official midwife training materials, curated an open OBGYN QA dataset of 20,500+ questions from five public medical benchmarks, and benchmarked the on-device model against leading models (e.g. GPT-5) to evaluate performance gaps.
In Zanzibar, the Internet is very unreliable, that's why we need to run the model completely offline. We are pushing the limits on how well an on-device model can perform to provide healthcare guidance, with the help of RAG.
I know there is still a long way before it could be deployed to the field, but I'm excited to make the small steps towards there.
Quantifying the Invisible: Women Doctors in Rosenwald Guides
Aug 2025 – Feb 2026Researcher · EPFL Laboratory for History of Science and Technology
Collaborated with historians to design a double-triangular annotation framework combining LLMs and human labeling, achieving >50% reduction in annotation effort at >99% accuracy. Built a benchmark of 2,600+ entries and extracted 577,000+ records from the Rosenwald Guides, discovering 3,700+ female doctors. Submitted to ACL Rolling Review.
I feel very proud to be able to cooperate with Jérôme Baudry from EPFL, Mikhaël Moreau and Amélie Puche from Institut des humanités en médecine (Lausanne). They are certainly among the most professional and respectable researchers I've ever worked with. They have clear goals and offered me the resources to achieve them, while giving me the freedom to conduct the research with my own taste and judgment.
I like this project a lot. For one thing, discovering the female doctors in the Rosenwald Guides is very meaningful work. I'm happy to be able to extract the data so that historians could make use of them. For another, the annotation framework I proposed is simple, elegant and effective. I like this kind of work.
Sentiment Contagion on Social Media
Mar 2025 – Jun 2025Course Project · EPFL
Analyzed 6.4 million comments and 1 million posts from Reddit's r/unpopularopinion using RoBERTa-based sentiment classification with manual validation. Confirmed statistically significant emotional contagion: post sentiment significantly influences comment sentiment.
I've always felt sensitive to emotions on social media. Now I have the proof of the emotion contagion. I will try my best to take care of myself there :)
Design Prototype for True Cost of Food
Sept 2024 – Dec 2024Course Project · EPFL
Developed a Figma design prototype offering recipe-based food recommendations weighted by true environmental cost. Promoted sustainable food culture through UX design. Received the highest grade among all designs in the track.
This project gave me a lot. I'm very lucky to stay good friends with my teammates — they listened and supported me. And I gained my first real understanding of environmental thinking. At first I didn't really understand why people are so serious about it. But over time, also boosted by my Swiss roommate from the Greens, I started to understand and try to contribute when I can. My diet is also getting healthier and more sustainable :)
LLM-powered Conversational Agent for Customer Service
May 2024 – Jun 2024Research Intern · Idle Fish, Alibaba Group
Aimed to apply LLMs as conversational agents to enable automated buyer-seller bargaining on a used-goods platform. Processed real-world customer conversation data to support model development and evaluation.
Although this internship only lasted for less than two months (I got the EPFL offer and I needed to prepare for the admission), it still brought me a real peek at the noisy real-world data, and let me feel the working vibe of a big tech company.
Education
Master in Digital Humanities
Aug 2024 – Jun 2027EPFL
PhD Program in Information Systems (withdrew to pursue MSc at EPFL)
Aug 2022 – Jul 2024Tsinghua University
GPA: 4.00 / 4.00
Bachelor's Degree, Computer Science and Technology
Aug 2018 – Jul 2022Tsinghua University
GPA: 3.89 / 4.00 · National Scholarship (Top 2%) · Outstanding Graduate (Dept.)
Skills
Contact
I'm always happy to talk about AI for social good, research ideas, or potential collaboration. Feel free to reach out — I read every message.
Social Work
Student Representative & Member of Teaching Committee
Sept 2024 – Aug 2025Digital Humanities, EPFL
Olympic Family Assistant
Jan 2022 – Apr 2022Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics & Paralympics