Ethan Rong(Aijun Rong)

3D room
ASCII portrait of Ethan Rong

About me

Hi, I’m Ethan.

(Aijun Rong)

Applied Mathematics at UNC–Chapel Hill.

I make things to understand them.

  • A paper on what a rating keeps.
  • A trivia game that asks how sure you are.
  • Short videos on how the tech in your pocket works.
  • A ski wax without PFAS.

Now

  • AI@UNCOct 2026 –

    Student researcher, Infrastructure Pod

  • Carolina Impact FellowshipSep 2026 –

    ncIMPACT Initiative, UNC School of Government

    A resource project for North Carolina community teams.

Links

GitHub⁠LinkedIn⁠ORCID⁠IEEE Xplore⁠

In the room

Things I’ve made.

  1. 01

    What Do Aggregate Ratings Preserve?

    Research, IEEE Access

    When many judgments become one rating, what is left? I audited 1,023 UK fiscal records and 11,621 school inspections. Solo.

     

    The paper

  2. 02

    AI@UNC

    Research, Infrastructure Pod

    Reinforcement-learning agents that trade in a prediction market over compiled binaries. I build what they run on: CI, containers, datasets and baselines.

  3. 03

    Who’s Bluffing?

    Game and study

    Ten questions in one minute. Pick an answer and stake how sure you are. Also a pre-registered study: does daily feedback improve calibration?

     

    Play⁠

  4. 04

    Graphify

    Content creation

    One idea each, drawn word by word.

     

    See the workflow

  5. 05

    Kaggriculture

    Competition, Kaggle

    A bot for a two-player farming game with one shared market. Solo. Bronze medal, 702nd of 10,148 teams.

  6. 06

    DaT Parkinson’s Challenge

    Competition, DrivenData

    A model that reads 3D brain scans and classifies the dopamine signal as normal or abnormal. 65th of 941.

  7. 07

    Loop

    App

    A campus reuse app. Photograph something you don’t need and Loop finds a student who asked for it. Solo.

  8. 08

    EcoGlide

    Chemistry

    A PFAS-free ski wax of beeswax and graphite.

  9. 09

    HarvestGreen

    Fundraising, founder

    Cookies by the tray, sold from a folding table, for OzHarvest.

     

    See the photographs

  10. 10

    Night Shift: Blackout

    Game

    A harbour rescue for two to four players, in the browser.

     

    Play⁠

  11. 11

    On snow

    Beyond the screen

    Out on the mountain

In the room

IEEE Access · Early Access, 2026

What Do Aggregate Ratings Preserve?

A Reproducible Audit for AI Reuse

Aijun Rong

When many judgments become one rating, what information remains? This paper audits 1,023 fiscal-uncertainty records from the UK Office for Budget Responsibility and 11,621 school inspections by Ofsted.

Inspection profiles reproduced 99.8% of the overall grades. Going the other way was uneven: 98.2% for Outstanding, 16.6% for Inadequate.

Every result can be regenerated from the supplied data with the Python standard library.

DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2026.3748818

Read on IEEE Xplore⁠ORCID⁠

In the room

Graphify

One video, from topic to upload.

Each one is code: a sourced script, a voice timed word by word, a scene rendered frame by frame. Nothing is published until every gate passes.

  1. Write

    1. 1Pick the topicOne everyday thing, one question: how does it really work?Claude agent
    2. 2Source the factsEvery number and claim gets two primary sources, quoted and dated.Claude agent
    3. 3Write the scriptSix beats in 42 to 45 seconds, one question, one twist.Claude agent
    4. 4Run the panelA simulated viewer panel compares two script versions. Ten-minute cap.Claude + Codex

  2. Make

    1. 5Generate the voiceOne continuous read near 190 words a minute; Whisper times each word.Higgsfield, ffmpeg, Whisper
    2. 6Storyboard in codeA Python file puts one visual change on every spoken word.Python
    3. 7Render the framesChrome renders 300-frame parts; ffmpeg joins them with the voice.Remotion, three.js
    4. 8Pass the gatesScripts measure each word, the camera, the brightness and the opening frame.Node and Python scripts

    fail: fix, render again

  3. Finish

    1. 9Review the cutEach render is sent to me; my notes are logged verbatim.Me
    2. 10Add the soundAt most 14 effects, each within one frame of its event.Python, ffmpeg
    3. 11Publish the videoA title of 50 characters or fewer, a cover frame, then upload.Upload

In the room

Ethan carving a turn in a black jacket, blue-grey trousers and blue Salomon skisFull size⁠

On snow.

NZSIA Level 2 ski instructor.

The wax on the ledge is EcoGlide.

In the room

HarvestGreen.

Trays of cookie dough baking in a lit oven
Baked.
A tub of chocolate-chip cookies on a folding table beside a card reader and paper bags
Sold.

I founded HarvestGreen to raise funds for OzHarvest and awareness of food insecurity.

OzHarvest⁠

In the room

Chengdu to Chapel Hill.

A world map connecting Chengdu in China, Melbourne in Australia and Chapel Hill in the United States
  1. Chengdu

    Born here.

  2. Melbourne

    Geelong Grammar School⁠

    Grades 6–12

    Badminton, vice-captain of the First team. Hockey, First team.

  3. Chapel Hill

    UNC–Chapel Hill⁠

    Present

In the room

On my desk.

Bamboo, aluminium, a little warm light.

The coffee corner

Colophon

In the room

Colophon.

Products are modelled from their makers’ dimensions. The chair, mouse, bean bag and coffee bag began as Tripo models, rebuilt by hand in Blender.

Light baked in Blender, drawn with three.js. The type is Newsreader by Production Type.

Three lights: day, from a window you cannot see; rain, that window and the light over the desk; night, the lamps.

No image on this site was generated. The photographs are mine, except the coffee bag’s label.

Inspired by Felix Rieseberg’s website⁠.

Designed and built with Claude.

Credits

In the room