Zikun Lin

I am a PhD student at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, supervised by Prof. Viet Anh Nguyen and Prof. Daniel Zhuoyu Long. Before CUHK, I received an M.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University and a B.E. in Automation from Tsinghua University, and worked as a software development engineer at PayPal and Amazon.

I study data-driven decision-making under uncertainty, with a focus on operations research, robust optimization, machine learning, and their applications in operations management.

Manuscripts

Selective Ambulance Dispatch Under Contextual Travel-Time Uncertainty

Zikun Lin, Daniel Zhuoyu Long, Viet Anh Nguyen

This paper proposes IDEAL, a selective dual-dispatch framework for ambulance response under contextual and correlated travel-time uncertainty. The method learns scenario-aware travel-time representations from dispatch records and dispatches a second ambulance only when the optimistic path gap justifies the capacity cost.

Figure 2 from the IDEAL ambulance dispatch manuscript, showing the decision flow.

Experience

2021-2023

Software Development Engineer, PayPal

Delivered Australia CDR and US FDX consumer-permissioned data-sharing APIs with Java/Spring Boot microservices, REST integrations, and Spring Batch pipelines.

2020-2021

Software Development Engineer, Amazon

Built AWS audit workflows for Climate Pledge Friendly to support a six-country launch; implemented Scala Glue ETL over roughly 80M product records per day and contributed to ML/NLP auto-audit tools.

2019

Software Development Engineer Intern, Amazon

Built a mobile Shopping Assistant widget and backend recommendation aggregation logic for personalized shopping scenarios in the Amazon mobile app.

Education

2023-present

The Chinese University of Hong Kong

PhD student

2018-2020

Columbia University

M.S. in Computer Science

2014-2018

Tsinghua University

B.E. in Automation

Teaching

2024-2026

Teaching Assistant, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

  • SEEM5710 Principles of Operations Management, Fall 2025
  • SEEM3650 Fundamentals in Decision and Data Analytics, Spring 2024
  • SEEM3620 Introduction to Logistics and Supply Chain Management, Spring 2024, Spring 2025, Fall 2025
  • ESTR1005 Linear Algebra for Engineers, Spring 2025, Spring 2026
Fall 2024

Teaching Assistant, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen

  • LSC5710 Transportation Logistics, Fall 2024
Fall 2019

Teaching Assistant, Columbia University

  • COMS W4701 Artificial Intelligence, Fall 2019

Honors and Awards

2018

Outstanding Graduate Award, Department of Automation

Tsinghua University

2017

National Scholarship

Ministry of Education, P.R. China

2017

Meritorious Winner, Mathematical Contest in Modeling

COMAP