About

I’m currently a Research Scientist at Meta since 2022 where I get to work with fabulous colleagues. We’ve recently launched a chatbot that helps businesses sell products to consumers through Messenger and WhatsApp.

Before Meta I co-founded Talka AI in 2021 (named to CB Insights AI-100) where I helped secure seed investment from Zetta Venture Partners, Horizon Ventures and angels Ilya Sutskever CSO of SSI, David Ha CEO of Sakana AI, Hubert Palan CEO of productboard, Paul Kim CEO of y-intercept. Hired key engineers like Ziyu Wang (now Co-Founder at Haiper AI) and Henry Zhou (co-author of wav2vec) and built a conversational AI product that analyzes sales videos for visual and language insights to predict deal success.

I was a Research Scientist at Google Research from 2015 to 2020 where I worked on reinforcement learning and its applications, including saving energy in data center cooling and some fundamental findings about Q-learning. Around 2019 I became interested in conversational AI in part due to empirical advances in transformer models and co-organized a AAAI 2020 Workshop on Interactive and Conversational Recommendation Systems.

I spent five wonderful years in Toronto where I received my PhD in Computer Science from University of Toronto (2009-2014). I was advised by Craig Boutilier and my dissertation was on Group Decision Making with Partial Preferences which was awarded Best PhD Dissertation Award from CAIAC. I was fortunate to be surrounded by excellent scholars and friends whose works have been at the forefront of their fields and the roots of the current AI boom. During my PhD I received the Google PhD Fellowship in Computational Economics and had Co-Founded Granata Decision Systems which was acquired by Google in 2014.

I received my BMath and MMath from University of Waterloo (2003-2009) studying Computer Science and Combinatorics and Optimization. I was advised by Shai Ben-David and my Master’s dissertation was on Fundamental Limitations of Semi-Supervised Learning. During my undergrad I had also received a CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Award.