I am a natural optimist and a dreamer with aspirations for something big. What’s considered “big” is relative—it evolves in response to the world around me and sometimes to the shifts within my own spiritual landscape. I’m also an avid enthusiast of human technologies, and the combination of these two passions gives me a strong vision and high expectations for future innovations. However, when I observe human technological progress, it often feels like advancement is slow and incremental, especially in theoretical and industrial fields over the past few decades. This sense of stagnation leads me to seek inspiration from sci-fi movies and literature. That’s why StarTrek has become one of my all-time favorite series and films—it represents the future I envision. It also fuels my drive to explore projects that might one day bring that future to life.
Academic Experience
I have a background in both optical physics and computer science:
- 2010-2016: Ph.D. in Information and Communication Engineering, Shanghai Jiaotong University
- 2006-2010: Bachelor’s in Optical Information Science and Technology, Xidian University
My Ph.D. research focused on the renewal of models and the characteristics of human mobility, using advanced statistical techniques to analyze large-scale network traffic. There is a significant gap between observable behavioral patterns and the raw digital data collected from sources like mobile geo-located application traffic. Advanced analysis and modeling methods to bridge this gap are still lacking, which initially inspired my work. My thesis was supervised by Prof. Yaohui Jin at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and it is now publicly available here (in Chinese).
A by-product of this research was the creation of the awesome-public-data community. In the early years of Big Data (around 2009-2010), there was a significant struggle to find high-quality research data, which led me to start this community to host a curated collection of research-quality datasets. The community remains active to this day. You can join the latest discussions on data joy in our Slack channel.
Industrial Experience
At the outset of my Ph.D. journey, the Big Data trend was emerging, and the technology was rising through the Gartner Hype Cycle, still in the Innovation Trigger phase. Big Data, along with data science and preprocessing, became central to my daily research on human behavior pattern mining. After graduation, I joined Transwarp Inc., a domestic Big Data startup named after the sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem, in Shanghai. There, I spent over three years exploring the integration of Big Data stacks with the dynamic cloud-native Kubernetes ecosystem.
In 2020, I transitioned to a leading Cloud-native service provider, diving deep into cloud-native services for big data warehouses and data lakes. It was during this time that I started to seriously consider the technologies behind Wolfram Alpha, captivated by its efficiency and the unification of multi-paradigm data representations. These features lie at the heart of a successful data-lake warehouse. However, when I realized that fulfilling my experimental ideas within a commercial product burdened by tech debt was a challenge, I founded the LambdaCogito community to explore these proof-of-concept ideas.
With nearly seven years of industrial experience, I’ve acquired a wide range of skills necessary for these PoCs, from programming languages to architectural design. However, I know there is still much to learn to complete my toolkit before I can lead my own team. This includes areas like computer language theory, mathematical logic, computational logic, artificial general intelligence, and cognitive science, among others. This continuous learning process also offers me valuable insights into the rapid evolution of data technologies.
Hobbies
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.
