Staff Profile

Biography

My name is Yan Lin, you can call me Quinne. I am a PhD student in Computer Science, working on machine learning and multimodal learning, starting in March 2025 (originally started in September 2024, delayed to Spring 2025 due to ATAS). My research is fully funded by Postgraduate Research Studentship (5 year UKRI stipend).

I am working as a Postgraduate Teaching Assistant in the School of Computing, acting as a demonstrator and marker for undergraduate and taught postgraduate courses, assisting in supervising taught postgraduate dissertations, invigilating examiners, providing IT support for the urban science building, and acting as an open days and offer holder experience days guided tours.

Current Research

My doctoral project (2025-) focuses on deep learning, generative AI, and LLMs. Particularly transformer-based architectures, for tasks such as text generation, domain adaptation, and multilingual comprehension. I am especially interested in the interplay between model performance and ethical considerations, including bias detection, representation, and explainability. 

About Me

Originally from China, I earned my BA in Finance and Economics in China (During my junior year, I was selected for an exchange program at National Taipei University in Taiwan due to my academic performance). After that, I worked for three years in China's four largest state-owned banks and ten largest brokerage firms.

With my interest in math and programming, I changed my major to Master of Data Science at Durham University (Sep 2022 to Jan 2024). My Machine Learning course assignment received a 90% first place high score and my Critical Perspectives in Data Science course essay was chosen as the example for the next cohort. (Others: Introduction to Mathematics for Data Science - 92%, Programming for Data Science - 83%, Introduction to Statistics for Data Science - 82%, Data Exploration, Visualization and Unsupervised Learning - 80%, Introduction to Computer Science - 76%, etc) I have also attended OXML2024 (Representation Learning and Generative AI summer school at University of Oxford's Mathematical Institute).

My Durham dissertation used an integrated neural network model to predict the outcome of The Hundred cricket matches, achieving a successful prediction rate of 76%. I had also served as a student representative and postgraduate ambassador at Durham University.

In the 2024 PhD application journey, I got 6 fully-funded international scholarships from Russell Group universities (QS 20–150), such as Durham University Business School Scholarship, Durham University joint PhD Scholarship - China Scholarship Council, Newcastle University 5-year Computing PhD Scholarship, and Queen Mary University of London 5-year MRes+PhD scholarship, etc.

In outside of my studies, I enjoy playing murder mystery games (such as Murder Mystery and Turtle Soup), escape room games, and creating my own podcast channel.

I welcome any enquiries regarding my research, teaching, or potential collaboration opportunities.

Please feel free to get in touch (y.lin64@ncl.ac.uk or quinne.lin@ncl.ac.uk).

Research Interests

• Deep Learning
• Machine Learning
• Generative AI
• Large Language Models

• Spring 2025: undergraduate first-year course Programming Portfolio (2) - CSC1035 (Lab Demonstrator and Marker)
• Summer 2025: Invigilator for June resit exams & School of Computing PCs Refresh