My Bio
Who I Am
Curiosity has been in Kai's blood through his life; maybe it's not that easy to realize when first picking up a flask from grandpa's desk, but definitely very clear when putting a blister on his hand soldering his first radio before going into elementary. Born and raised in Beijing, China, Kai has been to a lot of places and has seen a lot. He's a blend of a city/country boy, spent a year in West Virginia raising animals on a farm while doing a study-aborad in high school -- and he's secretly proud of his dual high school degrees KaI has studied and worked in China, India, and the U.S. for many years, and people seem to enjoy his unique quirkiness. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate, a NLP researcher, and scrum master in his lab at NC State University.
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Kai has taught and mentored many undergraduate students in different settings; he has also worked in various tech branches of the industry. He has been a software engineer, a data engineer, a machine-learning algorithm engineer/patent writer, and an applied scientist.
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Aside from work, Kai enjoys going scuba diving and practicing Kendo in his free time. That is, when his winter puppy Summer, a Siberian husky, not nudging him to play with her
Educational History
Learning and Living
Ph.D. Computer Science, NC State University
Sep 2018 - June 2022
Mentoring students to help them navigate through making contributions on live open source projects used in public; Creating materials for student assessments, and drafting grant funding proposals aside from scholarly literatures
M.S. Computer Science & Management Information Systems, UNC at Wilmington
Sep 2014Â - Dec 2017
Running labs on Python programming for beginners, guiding them on creating their own ASCI games
B.S. in Computer Science, Beijing Institute of Technology China
Sep 2010 - June 2014
Leading fundraising projects in Student Governing Association (ASSA), directing community outreach and event sponsoring for student organizations on campus.
B.A. in Finance (Online), Renmin University China
Sep 2018 - June 2023 (Exp)
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Work-study Abroad, Alliance University India
Sep 2013 - May 2014
Exploring the possibility of creating a joint program between 2 universities across China and India. Created rules, guidelines, and schema for future participants
Professional Experience
Past Roles
Applied Scientist Intern, Amazon.com
May - Aug / 2019&20
- Having in-depth knowledge in current industry trends, invented a simple and effective solution with collaborative filtering algorithms, autoencoder, and natural language processing (NLP) skills, completed a recommender system in python that increased employee knowledge gain speed by 7%.
- Demonstrated strong ownership through creatively producing 3 machine learning solutions on AWS with SageMaker, Alder, EC2, and S3 in HR employee development; cut down onboarding time for new software developing engineers by 11%
- Through diving deep and utilizing extensive problem-solving knowledge, implementing machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) NLP text summarization algorithms such as Bert, BART, Pegasus, ERNIE, Luhn, TextRank, SumBasic, and KLsum on customer transaction data, delivering results to 3 teams of 50+ people.
- Joining ownership, communication, and collaboration skills, working backward with stakeholders from 3 teams in 2 countries in and outside of the company, created a solution to summarize customer complaints which could be applied to all product listings on Amazon.com
Machine Learning Algorithm Engineer Intern, BMSmart Inc.
May 2018 - Aug 2019
Earning trust from team members and management through excellent leadership skills and adaptability, led a team of 3 members quickly performed end-to-end analysis, and adapted LeNet machine learning deep learning algorithm and image data enhancement technique, resulting in an OCR product from scratch with patent pending.
Data Engineer, FaceAging Group
May 2016 - May 2018
- Invented and creatively simplified a data management solution, with SQL and NoSQL as backend, python, and PyQt as the controller and front end created an end-to-end data management system from scratch, cut down data aggregation time by 60%
- Learned solutions and had always been curious about current industry trends, implemented machine learning techniques with the graphlab-create platform in python, deployed 6 prototype machine learning models within weeks, and compared their performance, supported the company’s business model as well as strategic decision making.