I am a natural optimist, also a dreamer about something big. This big is relative in the sense that its state is dynamic with the outside world or sometimes with my own inside spiritual world. I am also an enthusiastic lover of human technologies. Combining these both gives me a strong vision and expectation of innovations. However, human technologies are enduring with a small progress almost in every theoretical and industrial domain these decades. This deepest depression against reality makes me to absorb inspiration from sci-fi movies and writings. This is why StarTrek becomes one of my favorite episodes and movie series in the history, and also why I have to explore some projects that would fulfill my own vision on the future.
Education
- 2010-2016: Shanghai Jiaotong Univ., Information and Communication Engineering, Ph.D.
- 2006-2010: Xidian Univ., Optical Information and Science Technology, Bachelor
Ph.D. Research
My Ph.D. research was on renewed models and characteristics of human mobility, with advanced statistical techniques upon large-scale network traffic. There is a large gap between observable behavioral patterns and digital bits that is collected from raw network data like mobile geo-located application traffic. Advanced analysis and modeling approaches are still in a shortage. This shortage inspires my initial efforts on the work. My thesis was advised by Prof. Yaohui Jin at Shanghai Jiao Tong Univ.. Now the thesis is available for public (in Chinese).
In the research, a by-product is the initialization of awesome-public-data community. During the early years of big data (back to 2009 and 2010), it suffered a painful search for high-quality research data. This urged me to start the data community and host a bunch of research quality data. This community is still active since then. You can access slack channel for latest discussion on data joy.
Industrial Experience
At the beginning of pursuing my Ph.D. degree, Big Data tendency was appearing and this technology was climbing its Gartner Hyper Cycle at the Innovation Trigger stage. Big data as preprocessing and data science were involved in my daily research on human behavior pattern mining. I joined a big data startup, Transwarp whose name comes from sci-fi novel Three Bodies, at Shanghai after my graduation. And in there I spent more than three years to explore the technology of combining big data stack with the appealing cloud-native Kubernetes ecosystem.
Afterwards in 2020, I joined the team of a native Cloud service provider to dig deeply into the cloud native service for big data warehouse (as well as data lake). From then I began to seriously think about the technologies under the hood of Wolfram Alpha, as I was attracted and called on by its efficiency and unification of multi-paradigm data representations. These features lay in the core of a successful data-lake warehouse. When I realized that it was hard to fulfill my experimental thoughts on a commercial product with a heavy tech debt, the LambdaCogito community was constructed to do these proof of concepts (PoC).
With nearly seven years of industrial experience, I have learned a bunch of skills required by the PoCs. From programming languages to arch design, there still more knowledge and theories to learn to fill in the toolbox before having my own team. It includes computer language theory, mathematical logic, computational logic, artificial general intelligence theory, cognitive science and more. This extensive learning also gives me an insight into the rapid iteration of data technologies.
Life
Family is the treasure at the core of my heart. Without them, all the stories we create for ourselves would be swept away by the winds of time. The essence of who I am, along with my ambitious goals, is rooted in finding meaning amidst the aimlessness of life. This perspective isn’t one of pessimism; rather, it is true optimism. I have a passion for Chinese calligraphy, maintaining an aquarium, traveling, reading, and reflecting. However, everything is better when shared with family.
