About

That's an old joke from my civil engineering days, but it captures something real. I started in traffic engineering in the US and Canada — three years of modelling intersections and writing VBA scripts that my former colleagues apparently still use. Somewhere along the way I realized the parts I liked most were the data problems, not the concrete ones.

So I went back to school. Got a statistics degree at Leiden University in the Netherlands — finished ahead of the normal schedule, the first in the program to do so. Joined Accenture as a data science consultant, got promoted within a year, and ended up leading a team of 8 on a project that used AI to digitize Nazi persecution records — 30 million documents from the Arolsen Archives, the world's largest collection on Holocaust victims. That project won the V360 Global Innovation Award and led to 2 NLP patent applications.

Then large language models happened. I moved back to China, joined an AI research startup (txyz.ai, 500K+ registered users), and now I'm at KAWO building Kevin — an AI marketing agent that serves 500+ global enterprise brands. My days are spent in the gap between what AI is supposed to do and what it actually does in production. I write about that gap sometimes.