Detail of Botticelli's Primavera: the Three Graces dancing with their hands joined above them, and Cupid drawing a bow overhead. The plate is printed as ink except for the archer and his arrow, which are left in full colour.

Fig. 1 · Botticelli's Primavera, the 3 graces and cupid

Sunny Sun

Exploring the intertwining of human and artificial intelligence

Shaping AI interfaces at the frontier of HCI and crafting solutions that empower people without creating overreliance

sunsunny@stanford.eduLinkedIn

SUBJECT 01

  • Stanford BS in Symbolic Systems '27
  • Stanford MS in Computer Science '28

human-computer interaction concentration

Fig. 2 · CS147 demo day

Work

Fig. 3 – 9
Ambient Intelligence: Sensor Dashboard: The number of US adults over 60 is set to double by 2050, outpacing the caregivers meant to support them. Ambient intelligence, a network of in-home sensors that tracks daily activity, is one way to help them age in place safely. To run a study like that in real homes at The Sequoias, I designed and built two linked dashboards on a shared backend: one giving residents direct control over every sensor, the other letting researchers catch failures before any data is lost.

Fig. 4 · HCI Research · Full-Stack · Privacy

Ambient Intelligence: Sensor Dashboard

The number of US adults over 60 is set to double by 2050, outpacing the caregivers meant to support them. Ambient intelligence, a network of in-home sensors that tracks daily activity, is one way to help them age in place safely. To run a study like that in real homes at The Sequoias, I designed and built two linked dashboards on a shared backend: one giving residents direct control over every sensor, the other letting researchers catch failures before any data is lost.

Design & Full-Stack Prototype · 2025 – 2026 · Stanford HAI

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Fig. 6 – 9

Experiments

An anthology inspired by people, places, and experiences.
A photograph repainted as a Monet (a harbour town in loose violet and gold brushstrokes) surrounded by smaller studies of Rouen Cathedral and the grainstacks, above a slider marking the hours of the day.
Still

Fig. 12

Monet Enveloppe

Monet painted the same haystack dozens of times because he was actually painting the atmosphere around it (enveloppe). Drop in a photograph and this repaints it as a Monet, then relights it hour by hour across a day. Inspired by Monet in Venice show in SF 2026

Open monet-enveloppe.vercel.app
A weathered bronze surface filling the frame, mottled with verdigris and corrosion in green, rust and ochre.
Still

Fig. 13

Patina

An exploration of texture. Materials such as terracotta, bronze, and marble evolves over time to have different form and function, but they always have a memory underneath it. Built from scans by the museums that hold the objects.

Open patina-texture.vercel.app
An illustration of remote workers at desks scattered across a beach beside blue water and green hills, above the title The Faces of a Modern Nomad.
Still

Fig. 14

The Faces of a Modern Nomad

An interactive data essay on the stories of 3 very different digital nomads, and how digital nomadization impacts the society they move to

Open digitalnomadfaces.netlify.app

Papers

2 entries

CS 238

Modeling Economic Sanctions as a Markov Decision Process

Policy · AI / ML · Reinforcement Learning

Read paper

CS 221

Smarter Skincare Shopping: A Hybrid Recommendation System for Personalized Skincare Product Discovery with Machine Learning

ML · Recommender Systems · NLP

Read paperView code

About

Sunny Sun

Fig. 17

Recently: consulting at Bain, product management at Hatch Sleep, Nectar Social, and Beijing Powersoft Technology, UX research at Google, Spotify, and BiotechBeauty, and a fellowship at True Ventures.

I've been building things since before I had the vocabulary for it: fashion sketches at 8, a Wix site for my YouTube channel at 11, then whatever tool I needed next, Photoshop, Figma, Blender...

It was during CS147 where I first built a product end to end. My team built Stitch, an AI matching platform that helps small businesses co-host community events. We started with user interviews on University Ave and ended with a working React Native app on a live Gemini backend, and it won Best Poster on demo day. What fascinated me most was the gap between what people say and what they actually mean. During needfinding for Stitch, a customer told us she wanted to support small businesses, then mentioned she buys 90% of her goods from big chains. We built the product around that contradiction.

Experiences like this are why I love empowering people through technology, continually iterating and finding new ways to address their needs.