Never stop the climbing.
Personal Statement
Unlike many people who are always seeking for the easy way out, I am the guy who like to ask “why” behind. This habit helps me quickly reach the essence of things without taking the obvious for granted，and find the appropriate solution for tough challenges. However, even though I am an active thinker, it is still a tortuous search to the answer of the ultimate question: What is it that I am passionate enough to dedicate life and effort to, without considering the return?
Filled with struggle, searching and joy, I would like to share the journey with you, so you may have a better knowledge of who I am and what I want to do in the future.
I was born in an ordinary family in a remote, small city of northwestern China. Based on their personal experience, my parents are the firm believers of “knowledge changed fate”. As the first batch of college students after the resumption of the college entrance examination in the 1970s, my father got the job opportunity transferred to the Beijing headquarters through his self-discipline and hard work; My mother also became a national TV news reporter with her excellent English and perseverance. When I was four years old, my family moved to Beijing, the capital city of China, a place full of dreams and opportunities. Which opened my eye to the frontier of the rapid development of China. Unlike most of Chinese kids, my parents has always consulted with me and valued my opinion whenever there is a family problem or need to make a choice. Moreover, I was always encouraged to explore the world on my own. When I was a 12-year-old, I took the train alone to the unfamiliar city of Shanghai for first time, traveled around the city and experienced different local customs, which was unbelievable in the eyes of many other parents. As a kid, I completely have no idea about what I would do in the future. But the trust and encourage from my parents have cultivated my habit of thinking independently and given me a strong confidence and motivation to explore new things and move forward.
With the cultivation from my parents, another unexpected incident not only reshaped my outlook on life, but even reshaped the face of the earth, literally.
It was at 14:28 pm, May 12, 2008, an earthquake measuring 8.0 on the Richter scale occurred in Wenchuan, Sichuan Province. Over 69,000 people lost their lives in the quake, 374,176 were reported injured, with 18,222 listed as missing. My university was located at the heart of the earthquake when it happened-- the wall panels on the top of the head fell down one by one; The shaking ground prevented us from standing firm; Fear and frightened screams filled the surroundings. Fortunately, none of my classmates were hurt, but we were totally shocked by what we saw --the city was razed to the ground, and bodies excavated from the ruins were placed on the side of the road. Although the earthquake is ruthless, the glory of humanity that people showed after the earthquake made me full of strength -The network communication was interrupted, and the prime minister and governors rushed to the front of the earthquake. The road to the epicenter was collapsed, and the army took the aftershock risk and marched 70KM to break through the life-saving passage. Global rescue teams came in and sharing their expertise. The traffic capacity was insufficient, and the taxi drivers used their own taxi to help deliver the relief supplies. Citizens helped in any way they could by offering transportation, donation or any form of facilitation. The affected people lacked food and clothing, and the donations flooded in from all over the country and the global. Supports and warm wishes become overwhelmed on the internet, becoming a driven force for the excavation, rescue, rehabilitation and rebuild of the area. Inadvertently, my eyes were already full of tears.
The earthquake opened my eyes for the beauty and greatness of human nature, and the innate ability for people to bound with love, trust and support. It is this crude but valuable experience that enabled me to confront the challenges of the most controversial internet products with faith in the goodness of society.
After the receiving my master in computer science from USC, I returned to China and joined the internet company with the highest market value in China at that time, search giant - Baidu. At that time, China's search market was not particularly mature and standardized. Search advertisements were often filled with false information or phishing websites. This situation reached its climax in 2016, and finally broke out with the "Weize Zexi Incident" that occupied the headline of all press for month - a 21-year old Chinese college student from Shanxi died after receiving DC-CIK, an expensive high risk experimental treatment for synovial sarcoma at The Second Hospital of the Beijing Armed Police Corps, which he learned of from a promoted result on search engine that described the treatment with overexaggerating effect. Baidu had put a lot of effort to improve the quality and confidence of the search results, but the traditional engineers' solutions were all based on algorithm optimization, which is vulnerable to the malevolence intention of the advertising company that profit by bypassing the algorithm. As a product manager for search advertising, I feel very sorry and responsible hearing the news and attacks from social network. Looking at the search results page that is completely sorted by machine algorithms, I had a eureka moment: why don't we introduce the power of users and social network into search result to help us with anti-cheating? I designed a user feedback mechanism. On the one hand, users are allowed to comment, collect, share, and even report search results, and these feedbacks are explicitly presented to all netizens for decision-making; On the other hand, these contents are incorporated as feedback features, so the page ranking algorithm can establish a positive and negative feedback loop to further improve the accuracy of the algorithm. My partner and I spent three days and nights to develop the model. The final experimental results exceeded our expectations - the proportion of violating false advertisements decreased by 58%. With the full data support, I pitched to the supervisor and he immediately agreed to go online this product with full flow! Due to the solid output, we were awarded the Baidu Product Innovation Award. Watching hundreds of millions of netizens use our products every day and benefit from it, I feel particularly fulfilled and satisfied.
"Weize Zexi Incident" made me realized that no matter what we do, we should have awe & respect for users, and can't forget the foundation of product design - "Use technology to make life better."
In 2017, Baidu's strategy was comprehensively transformed, the slogan of "All in AI" was put forward. Not only did Baidu introduce the industry star such as Andrew Ng, but also set up two new AI business groups of intelligent driving and smart home to focus on autonomous driving and voice assistant. This not only gives me the opportunity to get access to the latest AI technology, but also combines it with my biggest interest - automobile. I think this is simply my dream job! Without any hesitation, I talked the leader of the new team and successfully transferred to the new department "Internet of Vehicle".
As the world's largest car sales market, the competition of various automakers in China is fierce, but tradition automobile manufactures lack the innovative ability in par with the rapid progressing internet age. How to create differentiated highlight features, so that their own brand of cars can stand out from the crowd has become the biggest challenge of every car company. Why don't we use Baidu's AI technical advantages, to build an in-car assistant, so that the assistant can do things for the driver under different scenarios, so that driver can enjoy driving and the time in car? By combining voice recognition, image recognition, and multi-modal semantic understanding with user driving scene, we targeted to create the next generation human-car interaction experience, with smart cars possess further environmental awareness and decision making capabilities. Thinking further, it is always strange for users to talk directly with the car. A novel emotional fulcrum need to be constructed between driver and car. Based on those concepts, I started to develop the "Xiao Du" emotional robot for car. With Baidu's solid AI technology and team member's enthusiasm, we completed the robot version one in just six months. Although the robot initially only integrated a small number of functions, once it was launched, many international leading car companies including Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Volvo, Porsche and Ford sent a letter of intent for cooperation. The market responded in a way far beyond my expectations.
"Xiao Du" has demonstrated the huge market potential of social robots. But in order to design a smart, conversational, trusted, useful social robot, I know there are still so many interesting and difficult topics waiting to be explored and answered. For instance: How to establish the trust between the interface and people? How to make the system affect-award? How to train the “Xiao Du” via human feedback? How to make the it acquiring the adaptive learning ability? And most importantly, how to choose the most suitable application scenarios for such smart sensational interface under the current technical conditions? Based on my years of industry experience, the development of any new technology is not only driven by research. Industrialization and productization are the core for fully realizing the value of technology and affecting lives of people. Though difficult, all the topics above have aroused my strong interest and they are what I hope to further explore in the future.
Thus, if there could be common grounds between my expertise and your research interest, I would be delighted to further discuss on any collaboration or joint research possibilities. I also believe that my arrival will bring more diversified thinking, market-oriented project experience, solid technical background and most importantly - a heart full of love and passion.
Feel free to contact me.
Thank you for reading.