University of Chicago
Expected May 2027
Bachelor of Science, Computer Science, Mathematics, and Statistics
Chicago, IL
- T.D. Lee Scholarship Recipient
- Dean's List 2025-2026
In my free time, I enjoy writing fan novels and playing video games, and my favorite video game is Cyberpunk2077. I've hidden a secret “cheating” entry to my collection somewhere on this page. you'll know it when you find it!
Lydia (Ya Qi) Liu 柳雅淇
Undergraduate Researcher
Seeking PhD / Master's positions, Fall 2027
Hi, I'm Lydia! I'm a CS + Math student at UChicago who likes building reliable backend systems just as much as I like poking holes in them. Lately I've found my home in AI safety, doing research at the SAND Lab. Now I'm on the hunt for a PhD/Master's program starting Fall 2027. Feel free to reach me out at the contacts below!
- lydiayaqiliu + at + uchicago.edu
- github.com/lydiayaqiliu
- linkedin.com/in/lydiayaqiliu
Education
Research Experience
SAND Lab, University of Chicago
Dec 2025 – Present
Undergraduate Researcher · advised by Ben Zhao & Heather Zheng
Chicago, IL
- Updating and extending Fawkes, an image-cloaking tool that protects individuals against unauthorized facial recognition
- Updating and extending Glaze, a tool that protects artists' work from AI style mimicry
- Conducting AI safety research on targeted facial transformation
- Running Pangram red-team evaluations, probing the adversarial robustness of AI-text detection systems and analyzing model behavior under evasion strategies and distribution shift
Work Experience
Carelumi
Jun 2025 – Dec 2025
Backend Software Engineer Intern
Chicago, IL
- Developed backend services using FastAPI to support secure ingestion and retrieval of structured healthcare data
- Provisioned cloud infrastructure on AWS (EC2, RDS PostgreSQL, S3) to enable persistent storage and scalable service hosting
- Implemented database access controls and query logic via PostgreSQL Row-Level Security to support multi-tenant data isolation requirements
- Integrated an LLM API–based document processing workflow to automate validation of healthcare documents
- Established containerized deployment and automated testing workflow using Docker and GitHub Actions CI/CD
Tiptop Technologies, Inc
Dec 2024 – Mar 2025
Backend Developer Intern
Remote
- Stabilized backend infrastructure prior to product launch by diagnosing and resolving failures in FastAPI services
- Designed and optimized API endpoints for asset management workflows, improving responsiveness of frontend data requests
- Resolved concurrency issues in backend request handling by refining database access logic and constraint strategies
Projects
Satellite Constellation Planner
Mar 2026 – Present
- Built a scheduling engine coordinating observation tasks across satellite nodes
- Applying stateful execution modeling and property-based testing to ensure correctness of distributed scheduling logic
ML-Driven Ad Generation Pipeline
Jul 2025 – Present
- Prototyped a FastAPI backend with the BLIP-3 vision-language model for an automated ad generation workflow
- Designed a lightweight inference pipeline using FastAPI and AWS compute/storage services
Skills
Programming Languages
PythonSQLJavaScript
Backend & Web Frameworks
FastAPIFlaskNode.js
Databases & Storage
PostgreSQLMySQLDynamoDBAmazon S3
Cloud & DevOps
AWS (EC2, S3)DockerCI/CD (GitHub Actions)
Machine Learning
PyTorchHugging FaceLLM APIs
Tools
GitLinuxpytest