Mia

Tanaka

@ UC Berkeley · CS + Data Science · Class of '26

I build systems that make sense of messy data and write software that doesn't break at 2 AM. Currently doing ML research in the BAIR lab and hunting for summer 2026 internships.

What I work with

Languages

PythonJavaCTypeScriptRSQL

ML / Data

PyTorchscikit-learnpandasNumPySparkTableau

Systems / Web

ReactNode.jsPostgreSQLDockerLinuxGit

Recent Projects

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BearBot — Campus AI Assistant

RAG-based chatbot that answers questions about UC Berkeley courses, enrollment deadlines, and campus resources. Built with LlamaIndex for retrieval, GPT-4o for generation, and Netlify for serverless deployment. Used by 400+ students during pilot.

PythonLlamaIndexOpenAIReactNetlify

BearViz — Course Grade Distribution Explorer

Interactive data visualization tool that aggregates 8 years of UC Berkeley grade distributions (2M+ records). Built with D3.js and a FastAPI backend, it lets students compare grade curves across departments, instructors, and semesters before enrollment.

PythonFastAPID3.jsPostgreSQLTypeScript

SentimentScope — Real-Time Review Analyzer

End-to-end NLP pipeline that fine-tunes a DistilBERT model on Amazon product reviews and serves real-time sentiment analysis via a streaming API. Processes 2,000 reviews/second with 91.4% accuracy on held-out test data. Includes a live demo UI.

PyTorchHuggingFaceFastAPIReactDocker

From the Blog

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Mar 12, 2025

Why LoRA Works: An Intuition for Low-Rank Adaptation

Most ML papers throw math at you and call it an explanation. Here's how I actually developed intuition for why constraining weight updates to a low-rank subspace makes fine-tuning so efficient.

Machine LearningNLPResearch
Jan 28, 2025

What CS 162 Actually Taught Me About Writing Software

An OS course sounds irrelevant to application-level engineering. It isn't. Here's the mental model I built that changed how I think about every concurrent system I touch.

SystemsConcurrencyBerkeley

Let's build something
interesting

Open to internships, research collaborations, and conversations about machine learning, distributed systems, or anything data.

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