Hi, I'm Nathan Cheng 程一

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§ 01

Currently

Doing research with Anne Collins' lab at UC Berkeley and Jianqiao Zhu at HKU, building AI products on the side, and applying for product roles and HCI master's programs.

§ 02

Selected AI product work

AI visibility actions · Smart Cited Inc.

Selected 01Co-founder · 2026

SmartCited

Co-founded an AI-visibility action system that checks whether ChatGPT and Gemini recommend a local business, traces the sources they cite, and prepares customer-authorized website, Yelp and directory actions. Produced the statistical report behind it, which found the business’s own website cited in 62.7% of 630 answers, and led the team in building agent workflows for the three most-cited sources. Started at OpenAI Build Week, incorporated as Smart Cited Inc. in August 2026.

630-answer reportChatGPT + GeminiAgent workflows

Try the demo ↗ View submission ↗

Agent-native meal planning · WebMCP

Selected 02OpenAI WebMCP Challenge · 2026

CookTree

Agent-native meal planning built with a team of four: describe a dish and the app plans the week, breaks it into an ingredient tree, checks it against your kitchen and builds the shopping list. The page registers 13 WebMCP tools for the agent and deliberately withholds the card, address and spend limit. I built the original prototype and tested features late in the build.

13 WebMCP toolsDeepSeek V4 + Nano BananaHuman-in-the-loop checkout

Try it live ↗ View submission ↗ View source ↗

Live product · Public view

Selected 03Berkeley SkyDeck · 2026

PivotBridge.AI

Evaluated a pre-launch AI career agent across onboarding, interview, resume and decision workflows, and turned trust gaps and UX friction into implementation-ready product recommendations.

Product evaluationAI output qualityShipped improvements

Visit product ↗

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Welldify · Evaluated an LLM trained on 66,000 labeled sentences for journal-based wellbeing scoring against PERMA and DASS, and built a DeepSeek and generative-image workflow that shipped 30+ psychoeducation carousel sets.

Visit product ↗

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VStandby Studio · 24-hour BETA AI hackathon build: a real-time AI companion that detects livestream highlights, follows caption context and reacts through a selectable persona.

View source ↗

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Everyone At Once · Independent 0→1 product: twelve situational questions become a mix of fictional characters through LLM simulation and Bayesian inference.

Try it live ↗

§ 03

Research experience

'25HKU
w/ F. Cao

NeuroLeaD Lab ↗

In press at PNAS: third author on Two clusters of brain regions with distinct age-related profiles of functional connectivity in Autism Spectrum Disorder. Built the lab's first HPC pipeline for fMRI preprocessing and ran it on ABIDE-I/II and ADHD-200 (about 3,200 subjects), then a preliminary brain-age analysis comparing individual functional topography with a 30,000-subject normative atlas.

neuroimagingfmrihpcpnas-2026

'26UC Berkeley
w/ A. Collins

CCN Lab ↗

Built the simulation-based inference pipeline (TensorFlow GRU) that recovers reinforcement-learning-with-forgetting parameters and tells that model apart from a working-memory model in simulated behavior. At 27,000 agents per model the classifier reaches 0.92 accuracy against a 0.975 likelihood benchmark. Second author on a tutorial manuscript in preparation with Ti-Fen Pan and Anne Collins.

simulation-based-inferenceneural-netscognitive-modelstensorflow

§ 04

Thinking about

01Idea

Maslow had it backwards (sometimes).

The pyramid says you need food, shelter, money, love before you can do spiritual work. But a lot of the best art came from people whose base needs were not met — and arguably because they weren't.

02Idea

Why can't I search new places mid-route?

The real user task is "I'm going to X, but I also want to check out Y" — a near-universal trip pattern that today's maps still don't make easy.

03Idea

An AI-native instrument for music

Hardware: a foldable, Switch-sized core — a 12-key octave plus collapsible drum pads. Software: an AI music agent — hum a melody or describe what you want, and it arranges and lays it onto your tracks.

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