Leonard Jia

Hello, I'm Leo.

I'm a computer science master's student at the University of Southern California, concentrating in Artificial Intelligence. Before that, I studied CS at Gonzaga University, where I graduated in 2026.

Most of what I build sits somewhere between machine learning and software people actually use: computer vision apps, privacy-preserving learning research, and tooling that lets AI agents do real work.

  • Los Angeles, CA
  • Bellevue, WA
  • MS CS & AI @ USC
  • BS CS @ Gonzaga
Leonard Jia
Experience

Experience

Gonzaga Institute for Informatics and Applied Technology

Federated learning and differential privacy research

Oct 2025 – May 2026

Position
Research Assistant
Location
Spokane, WA
Focus
Privacy-preserving ML, security tooling
Website
gonzaga.edu

Investigated federated learning and differential privacy techniques for healthcare and finance applications, contributing to experiment implementation, data preprocessing, and performance evaluation.

Designed and tested MCP server functions for the Wazuh cybersecurity platform, with tools spanning alert management, vulnerability management, agent monitoring, and security analysis.

FAST Enterprises

Software for government agencies

May 2025 – Aug 2025

Position
Software Engineer Intern (Implementation)
Stack
C#, SQL
Website
fastenterprises.com

Engineered C# applications managing 300,000+ professional license accounts across state licensing systems, and optimized SQL queries for data extraction, validation, and transformation, improving system performance by 20%.

Worked with 48 licensing boards and commissions to gather requirements and align technical solutions.

Projects

Image Processing App

Desktop image editing and similarity search

GitHub

A cross-platform desktop app for image editing, with CNN-based feature extraction from pre-trained VGG16 and ResNet50 models and pairwise image similarity via cosine similarity. Packaged as a standalone executable.

  • Python
  • VGG16
  • ResNet50
  • PyInstaller

Aug 2025 – May 2026 · Windows, macOS

Face Recognition & Management App

Automated photo organization

A web app that organizes photos using facial recognition. Face detection and embedding generation run on DeepFace, enabling demographic analysis and similarity-based search through a Pinecone vector database.

  • DeepFace
  • TensorFlow
  • PyTorch
  • Pinecone

Jan 2025 – May 2025 · Web

Pokémon Tournament Data Dashboard

Deck and player analytics for competitive Pokémon

GitHub

A web dashboard for analyzing Pokémon tournament results, built on data parsed from the Toronto Regionals. It breaks down deck popularity, win rates, and player placements, with filters by deck, country, and placement range, interactive charts, and a JSON API.

  • Python
  • Flask
  • Pandas
  • D3.js
  • Streamlit

Jan 2026 · Web

Stanford TreeHacks 12

Real-time weightlifting form correction

GitHub

A computer vision pipeline combining Apple Vision with a custom YOLOv8 model exported to Core ML for on-device barbell tracking, plus a biomechanics rule engine (22+ rules across 6 exercises) that flags form issues with severity-based feedback.

  • Swift
  • Apple Vision
  • YOLOv8
  • Core ML

Feb 2026

Stanford TreeHacks 11

Fitness tracking with wearables

GitHub

A full-stack platform that pulls fitness metrics from wearable devices through the Terra API, with AI-driven insights, a streak-based motivation system, and real-time progress tracking.

  • React
  • Redux
  • Flask
  • Terra API
  • OpenAI API

Feb 2025

Stanford TreeHacks 10

Recipe sharing, but social

GitHub

A prototype iOS recipe-sharing and social networking app, designed in Figma and built in Swift on a Firebase backend supporting user profiles, recipe posts, and cross-account visibility of shared content.

  • Swift
  • Firebase
  • Figma

Feb 2024 · iOS

Outside of work

Pokémon

I collect Pokémon cards. My whole collection is on Collectr.

Travel

I enjoy going to places I haven't been to before.

Cars

Ask me about my 1990 Mazda Miata.

Sports

On Sundays, you'll find me watching the Seattle Seahawks.