ML/NLP · AI Automation · Data Systems

Zikun Fu

MSc Computer Science, Ontario Tech University · 2026 · Oshawa, ON (open to Toronto / Ottawa / remote)

MSc Computer Science graduate working at the intersection of language models and structured data. My thesis formalized Database Entity Recognition and reached 93.2% F1 with a T5 + MiniLM pipeline, published at IEEE IRI 2025. Recently building grounded LLM systems and AI automation — a production-style analytics assistant with structural anti-hallucination guarantees (100% grounding / 0% hallucination on its evaluation harness), and automation pipelines that turn hours of manual review into fully auditable, human-gated LLM runs.

Portrait of Zikun Fu
93.2%
F1 on the DB-ER benchmark
T5 · MiniLM · PyTorch · seq-labeling ↗
100% / 0%
grounding accuracy / hallucination
DuckDB · sqlglot · grounded agent ↗
$10.34
to grade a 70-student final exam
Claude · OpenRouter · prompt caching
3,400+
multilingual records migrated
LimeSurvey · Twig · MySQL · Python ETL

Projects

Hermes Clinic Analytics

2026
github.com/ZikunFu/hermes-clinic-analytics ↗
100% grounded · 0% hallucinated · 59 tests

A chat assistant that answers business questions over a simulated optometry clinic's data with structural anti-hallucination guarantees: a read-only DuckDB engine, a sqlglot-parsed SQL allowlist, charts built from query results (never model-typed numbers), and exact SQL provenance on every answer. An oracle-backed scoring harness measures 100% grounding accuracy and 0% hallucination; 59 offline unit tests plus a live bypass-safety suite verify the guarantees hold. Built on the Hermes agent platform with Open WebUI as the front-end.

Web Presence Report

2026
Private client engagement — ongoing
< $1 per run · cost + compliance gates · full audit trail

An automated pipeline for a local optometry clinic that turns its scattered online footprint — Google Business Profile, reviews, PageSpeed, 25-point geo-grid rankings, backlinks, on-page health — into a graded, client-ready report with a 30/60/90-day action plan. Built-in cost gates (estimated spend approved before any paid API call; a full run is under $1) and human-review gates for health-content compliance (every clinical claim is flagged for clinician sign-off; review text is never reproduced verbatim). LLM use is interpretation-only: the AI writes the narrative, never the numbers.

LLM Exam Grading Pipeline

2026
Coursework tooling — code private
$0.15 / student · 70 students · $10.34 total

Auto-grades scanned handwritten final exams for a 4th-year compilers course by sending per-question page images to Claude (via OpenRouter) with model solutions and strict grading rules. Produces per-sub-question scores with confidence and legibility ratings, a human-review flag list, and a full audit trail; prompt caching keeps costs low — ~70 students graded for $10.34 total (~$0.15/student). Flagged items go through a scripted human-review adjustment workflow.

Research & Publications

MSc Thesis: Database Entity Recognition using Language Models

Defended Apr 2026
Thesis (Ontario Tech repository) ↗

Natural-language interfaces to databases must ground user questions to the tables, columns, and values of a schema. The thesis formalizes Database Entity Recognition (DB-ER) as sequence labeling over {O, Table, Column, Value} and studies two settings: an open-world T5 tagger and a closed-world verifier that grounds predictions against a target database via semantic similarity.

  • Formalization of DB-ER as a sequence labeling task
  • Benchmark: 1,000-example human-annotated dataset derived from Spider & BIRD
  • Synthetic data pipeline: 15,000 training examples generated from paired SQL via AST parsing and integer linear programming
  • Results: T5-Large with synthetic augmentation reaches 80.8% F1; closed-world MiniLM verification raises this to 93.2% F1

Publications & Talks

Experience

Research Assistant

May 2026 – Present
Ontario Tech University
  • Building grounded LLM systems over structured business data — analytics with hard anti-hallucination guarantees and automated, human-gated reporting pipelines (see Projects above).

Teaching Assistant — CSCI 4020U Compilers

Jan 2024 – May 2026
Ontario Tech University
  • TA for the 4th-year compilers course (Kotlin), including lab support and exam marking.
  • Built an LLM-assisted grading pipeline for handwritten finals with confidence flagging and human review (see Projects above).

GREx Redevelopment Project Manager

Dec 2024 – Apr 2025
Mitch and Leslie Frazer Faculty of Education, Ontario Tech University
  • Led the migration of the GREx research platform from a legacy Symfony/Laravel stack to a Dockerized LimeSurvey 6.x + MySQL environment; deployed to production on DigitalOcean with automated TLS.
  • Wrote Python ETL against the LimeSurvey REST API importing 3,400+ multilingual records across 60+ research groups; built PHP plugin modules and Chart.js dashboards.

Skills

ML/NLP
PyTorch Hugging Face Transformers (T5, BERT, MiniLM) scikit-learn Sequence labeling / NER Embeddings & semantic similarity Fine-tuning Evaluation harness design
LLM Engineering
Grounded / tool-using agents SQL generation + allowlist validation (sqlglot) Prompt design & caching Structured-output parsing Hallucination measurement Cost tracking & gating Claude API OpenRouter Open WebUI
Data & Pipelines
DuckDB pandas NumPy ETL sqlglot pglast OR-Tools CP-SAT MySQL PostgreSQL SQLite MongoDB
Backend/Infra
REST API integration Docker & Docker Compose Apache reverse proxy Linux DigitalOcean Git/GitHub Let's Encrypt TLS pytest

Education

MSc, Computer Science

Jan 2024 – Apr 2026
Ontario Tech University · GPA: 4.24/4.3
Thesis: Database Entity Recognition using Language Models

BSc (Hons), Computer Science — Data Science specialization

2019 – 2023
Ontario Tech University · GPA: 3.86/4.3