Biography


Zeyuan with Bachelor Degree of Science
@ Tsinghua University

In 1988, I was born in Nanjing, China. In 1998, I luckily designed a dynamic programming algorithm in an elementary-school contest, before knowing the word "algorithm." Since then, an idea to do computer science started to form in my mind.

In 2000-2006, I studied at NFLS, a liberal-arts school majoring English, and won some math/algorithm prizes. This includes the World Champion in USACO and two Gold Medals in IOI.

In 2006-2010, I studied math and physics at Tsinghua University. In this period, I was lucky to win the top prizes in MCM, ACM/ICPC, and Google Codejam. I started my research career in 2009, and received an ICDM Student Paper Award and a Microsoft Young Fellow Award.

In 2010-2015, I enrolled in MIT's graduate program. I was fortunate to be co-supervised by Prof. Silvio Micali and Prof. Jonathan Kelner. My 2012 master thesis on a new auction theory with player uncertainties appeared in the Econometrica journal. My 2015 doctoral thesis is on new frameworks for optimization algorithms.

In 2015-2017, I went to Princeton/IAS for a postdoc. I worked on machine learning and optimization theory with Prof. Elad Hazan, Prof. Avi Wigderson, and a number of amazing students.

In 2017-2022, I had the pleasure of spending five wonderful years at MSR Redmond, where I began my career researching the foundations of deep learning by developing mathematical theorems and leveraging hundreds of V100 cards. I'm grateful to my manager, Ofer Dekel, for his support during this time.

Starting from July 2022, I became a member of the CoreML team at Meta FAIR Labs, where I have been provided with an academic research environment by my manager, Lin Xiao.