Machine learning · Computer vision · LLM systems
I build real-time voice agents and the test suites that measure what they say. Before that I built computer vision models that run on amazon.com.
PhD from the University of Washington, then IBM Research, five years at Amazon, and since 2025 co-founder and CTO of FluenTea, where I designed and built the product, from the voice agent to the Android app.
FluenTea is a video classroom with an AI speaking coach, ChaCha, for language schools. Every class and practice call is transcribed, and from the transcripts the teacher learns how long each student spoke and what to go over again. I built the coach, the tests that gate each of her releases, and the rest of the product, as the only technical person on the team. In the first university pilot, most students kept practising with her for longer than their teachers had asked.
Language schools run live classes in it, the coach runs practice calls between classes, and teachers are told what to reteach. I built the whole product, from the voice agent to the Android app.
Technical lead on three computer vision projects that went to production on amazon.com and Alexa, including a text-VQA model that filled in sizes for more than ten million products. Door Desk award; D-Extract at WACV 2023.
Led GTE, a table extraction system (WACV 2021), built the TableLab labelling tool around it, and organised a SemEval 2021 shared task. My PhD work on decoding behaviour from brain recordings and video was an oral at AAAI 2018.
I love brains and computers, basically any cognitive system. I was born in Nanjing, grew up in Canada, and have lived in Berlin since 2021, where I am slowly learning German. I like living inside other cultures, and role-playing and strategy games (Dragon Age and XCOM most of all).