VIVIAN ZHOU

Archive All projects

The full trail of experiments, systems, and shipped work.

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01 Machine learning · Fall 2025

Walmart Sales Forecasting

An end-to-end retail forecasting pipeline trained on 400K+ weekly sales records from 45 Walmart stores.

Benchmarked Random Forest, Linear Regression, KNN, ARIMA, and Seasonal Naive models; Random Forest reached 0.478 RMSE, 0.164 MAE, and explained 85.9% of sales variance.

  • Python
  • scikit-learn
  • statsmodels
  • Pandas

02 Pixel art & illustration

Art Works

Pixel art for an atmospheric game environment, including the background, crystal tileset, and plant asset.

Building detailed digital scenes through environmental storytelling, texture, color, and light.

  • Pixel Art
  • Environment Design
  • Tilesets
  • Game Art

03 Graphics systems · C++20 / Vulkan

Real-Time Vulkan Renderer

A from-scratch real-time C++20/Vulkan renderer with deferred PBR, glTF loading, image-based lighting, and shadow mapping.

Profiled a four-pass GPU pipeline to about 1.5 ms per frame; added multithreaded command recording, custom GPU memory allocation, and neural ambient occlusion in a compute shader.

  • C++20
  • Vulkan
  • GLSL / SPIR-V
  • Compute Shaders

04 3D art & motion

Blender Works

A selection of 3D scenes, studies, and motion experiments created in Blender.

Exploring composition, lighting, materials, and animation through short-form 3D work.

  • Blender
  • 3D Modeling
  • Lighting
  • Animation

05 Serious Games with AI

MIT Beaverworks Summer Institute

A multiplayer serious game and reinforcement-learning agent for ethical risk planning.

Trained a PyTorch CNN to 97% accuracy and hosted a live tournament with more than 90 players.

  • Python
  • PyTorch
  • Reinforcement Learning

06 Next.js e-commerce platform

BlackMarket

A student-built e-commerce platform developed with the BlackMarketGT team.

Contributed to a modern commerce interface and the project’s web application foundation.

  • Next.js
  • Flask
  • React