Hi! My name’s Thien An (Alex) Tran, a Computer Science student at the University of South Florida with a focus on system design and backend development. I’m passionate about building scalable, efficient systems and exploring how AI can be integrated into practical applications. I have hands-on experience developing robust backend solutions using FastAPI, Python, and Pydantic, and I work comfortably in Linux-based environments like Arch Linux.
At the lab, I’m excited to explore how AI can be integrated into systems and conduct experiments on robotics and AI applications that assist people in daily life. I look forward to collaborating with the team, contributing to impactful projects, and growing as a researcher and a software engineer.
— 3/14/2026
Hi! I’m Thien An (Alex) Tran, a Computer Science student at the University of South Florida. At the RARE Lab I worked on projector camera systems for projected AR, building and running the experiments behind that work.
What I take away is less about any one project and more about how research actually happens. I learned to design an experiment before running it, to verify a setup before trusting a full day of data to it, and to debug the physical side of a system as carefully as the code, since most of the problems turned out to live in the hardware rather than the model. I also learned to say what results actually support instead of what I hoped they would show, which was the harder skill by a good margin.
Thank you to Dr. Han for the chance to do real research this early, and to Hong Wang for the day-to-day mentoring that made the hard parts learnable. I would recommend the RARE Lab to any student who wants to find out what research really feels like.
— 8/17/2026