Acorn Social

Boyang Zhang

Boyang Zhang is an engineer who enjoys working on ideas with a positive societal impact. He is a prominent event host with more than 30 large-group social events hosted in the Ann Arbor, Michigan area. He has previously launched several successful products in the entertainment field and has both research and industry software development experience.

Kevin Calopisis

Kevin Calopisis is another software developer on the team and a second-year data science student at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor College of Engineering. Kevin has interned at Amazon as a Software Development Engineer Intern, giving him first-hand experience working on a multidisciplinary team delivering a product to users. Through this experience, Kevin has gained a deep understanding of customer obsession and user-centered development, iterating on user feedback, and working in a team to create products catered towards users. On top of this, he is a Data Structures and Algorithms Instructional Aide, where he has created a welcoming for all students, regardless of their background. He has also worked with other instructional aides to enhance lab slides, providing further clarity and depth on a variety of topics for over 30 students in his lab section.

Rafe Symonds

Rafe Symonds is a computer science and engineering student at the University of Michigan. He has interned at Charles Schwab and TechSmith, where he worked on backend systems and critical software features that people rely on every day. He has also teaches as game development instructor, helping students bring their creative ideas to life through programming and design.

Robert Dick

Robert Dick’s role is to advise on entrepreneurship, AI/ML systems, and algorithm design. He is also a Professor at the University of Michigan. Several of his technologies have been commercialized and sold in quantity. His memory compression technology was used in NEC smartphones when the company was selling 10 million phones a year and won the ComputerWorld Horizon award for high-impact information technology. He was the founding CEO of the Stryd wearable electronics company. Stryd invented the athletic wearable power meter and leads the market. Its product improves training and competition results for runners (https://stryd.com/). He has 157 publications mostly on AI/ML and embedded systems that have been cited 12,000 times.

Sophie Lin

Sophie Lin’s roles are marketing and moderation. She is a recent alumna from the University of Southern California who created the USCord—a community-run Discord server used by over 3,000 members of the USC student body—over the COVID-19 pandemic. She led the staff team in moderating the server and hosting community events like game nights, karaoke, movie watchalongs, and social events. Sophie also helped create and moderate several other Discord servers, including a general-purpose community server with over 7,000 members, and a video game studio’s server with over 5,500 members. A graduate from USC’s Marshall School of Business, with a degree emphasis in Marketing, Sophie also brings marketing experience to the team. She currently works for The Lost Glitches’ as part of their marketing team, where she has helped coordinate their social media calendar as well as run their RE:Birth Open Beta campaign.