I am currently a Lead AI/ML Engineer at Optum AI (UnitedHealth Group), where I feel incredibly lucky and honored to collaborate with many talented people on meaningful and impactful problems that help people live healthier lives and help make the health system work better for everyone (See our Mission & Values) ! Prior to that, I worked as an Applied Scientist at Amazon, focusing on search, ranking, pricing, and large language model applications.

Before joining industry, I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science at Purdue University Purdue University, where my research spanned optimization, machine learning, causal inference, and natural language processing. I also served as a postdoctoral researcher there. I received my B.S in the Computer Science Department at National Tsing Hua University and worked as a Research Assistant at Academia Sinica before moving to Purdue.

News

• Reviewer at ICLR, Sep 2025.
• Volunteer for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital at St. Jude Walk, Austin TX to raise funds for reducing costs for children with cancer, Sep 2025.
• Reviewer at Frontiers in Microbiology , Sep 2025.
• Presenter at DevDays 100x AI (an internal conference at UHG) on LLM-as-a-Judge, Sep, 2025.
• Reviewer at Frontiers in Immunology , Sep 2025.
• My dog Maria’s 1st Birthday! (JEPG), Sep 2025.
• Emergency Reviewer at AAAI, Sep, 2025.
• Reviewer at AISTATS, Aug, 2025.
• Reviewer at Frontiers in Pharmacology, Aug 2025.
• Reviewer at Frontiers in Pediatrics , Jul 2025.
• Reviewer at Frontiers in Neurology , May 2025.
• Reviewer at Frontiers in Microbiology , May 2025.
• Happy and honored to join as a Lead AI/ML Engineer at Optum AI (See our Mission & Values), May 2025.
• Reviewer at Frontiers in Pharmacology , March 2025.
• Reviewer at Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology, March 2025.
• An old article of mine in 2013 popped up in my Facebook feed, so I’m noting it down here as a personal time capsule, March 2025.
• Reviewer at Neurips 2025, Feb 2025.
• Reviewer at FAccT 2025, Dec 2024.
• Reviewer at ICML 2025, Dec 2024.
• Honored to be nominated as a full member of Sigma Xi, Nov 2024.
• Happy to announce that our paper on the Pricing Model was accepted in Amazon Machine Learning Conference (AMLC) Pricing Workshop, Oct 2024. ( We showed that via pretraining from multiple distributions of samples, the pricing model can reach flatter minima, via measuring the flatness of multimillion parameters loss landscape using constrained LBFGS , which means better generalization, and most importantly, setting/recommend the price of a product more accurately :) )
• Grateful to be invited to serve as a reviewer at AISTATS [Apologies due to time constraints, 0 biddings], Oct, 2024.
• Grateful to be invited to serve as a reviewer at ICLR, August, 2024.
• Grateful to be invited to serve as a Program Committee at AAAI, July, 2024.
• Honored to serve as a reviewer at Frontiers in Medicine, June, 2024.
• Attended Penn Causal Inference Summer Institute, June, 2024
• Thrilled to be selected as the final winner (selected from 234 teams out of 22 countries) at The IES International Hackathon at Amazon, May, 2024.
• Grateful to be a poster judge at American Causal Inference Conference (ACIC), May, 2024.
• Happy to serve as a reviewer at Amazon Machine Learning Conference (AMLC), May, 2024.
• Happy to serve as a reviewer at Neurips. May, 2024.
• One Paper Submitted to Amazon Machine Learning Conference (AMLC), May, 2024.
• Happy to serve as a reviewer at ICML. Jan, 2024.
• Paper accepted to ACM BCB (Jul ‘23). Published in Cell iScience. Jan, 2024.
• Applied Scientist at Amazon, Dec, 2023.
• Accepted and prestented a poster on GNN model for News framing prediction task at (The New Directions in Analyzing Text as Data (TADA), Nov, 2023.
• Invited to serve as a reviewer of NeurIPS. March, 2023.
• Invited to serve as a reviewer of ICML. Jan, 2023.
• Postdoctoral Research Associate at Purdue University , Jan, 2023.
• Ph.D Graduated, Dec, 2022.
• Paper accepted in PLOS Digital Health, Sep ‘22.
• Invited to serve as a reviewer of NeurIPS. March, 2022.
• Invited to serve as a reviewer of ICML. Feb, 2022.
• Invited to serve as a reviewer of ICPP. May, 2021.
• Presented our work “Identifying and Analyzing Sepsis States: A Retrospective Study on Patients with Sepsis in ICUs” at Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering (RCHE), (flyer). Feb 24, 2021.
• Featured article about our Distributed GPU-Accelerated Optimizer for Multiclass Classification Problems (link). Feb 3, 2021.
• Google Fellowship Nominated by Purdue University. Sept, 2020
• Invited to serve as a reviewer of ICDM. 2020.
• Book Chapter “Parallel Optimization Techniques for Machine Learning”. Springer. 2020
• Received Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering (RCHE) Student Scholarship, Purdue University. 2020 (Tweet)
• Our paper “Newton-ADMM: A Distributed GPU-Accelerated Optimizer for Multiclass Classification Problems” has been accepted in the Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference (SC20) - 18% acceptance rate.
• Received Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering (RCHE) Travel Award, Purdue University. 2020
• Received SIAM International Conference on Data Mining Travel Award (Cancelled due to COVID-19 outbreak), Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. 2020