opinion engine

Aaron Li

Founder, CEO

Aaron was lead engineer in the founding team at Scaled Inference, an AI startup founded by early Google veterans, backed by top Silicon Valley investors and scientists. Before that, he was an engineer in core machine learning systems at Google Research, and Australia’s national lab NICTA.

He won multiple awards in machine learning, including the prestigious ACM SIGKDD 2014 Best Research Paper Award as a lead author. He received MSc in Language Technologies (Computer Science) from Carnegie Mellon University, and BSc (Adv) with First Class Honours at Australian National University with quadruple majors in Computer Science, Computer Science, Mathematics, and Statistics. He started programming since the age of 7, and started mining Bitcoin since 2011.

Aaron lived in Beijing, New Zealand, Australia, before he moved to the US (thanks to Einstein Green Card).

Nina Wei

Co-founder, Product Manager

Before joining Qokka, Nina was working on an AI-powered product at deeplearning.ai. Prior to that, she designed and launched multiple AI-powered products at Silicon Valley AI Lab in Baidu Research.

She holds a master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction and Design from University of Washington, and completed a BS in Applied Psychology while doing HCI research at Zhejiang Sci-Tech University and Chinese Academy of Sciences. she was granted patent for multiple innovative designs, and authored a diverse portfolio of publications ranging from blog articles on Medium by invitation from multiple journals, to scholarly articles in top venues such as IEEE Pervasive Computing and ACM Interactions.

Haolin Jiang

Software Engineer

Haolin has over 7 years of experience as a full stack engineer. He has been a core developer at Agile Digital in Canberra, Australia. responsible for design and implementation of many systems ranging from smart farming solutions for Grain Growers, one of Australia's largest and oldest agricultural organization, to VR / AR toolsets used by creative studios (such as Unbnd Group) to deliver next generation of shopping experience in some of the largest shopping malls in Australia. Haolin was also a key developer in multiple startups providing smart retail solutions, such as PotatOS and DataPOS.

Haolin holds a BSc (honors) in Information Technology from Australian National University, and is currently on leave from MSc in Software Engineering.

Amal Duriseti

Software Engineer

Amal worked at several AI startups in areas such as healthcare. He made key contributions in several patents applications which he was listed as inventor. As an AI developer, he was responsible for projects such as systems that augment medical knowledge graphs, embedding and dimensionality reduction algorithms, and machine learning with medical data. As an AI enthusiast, he worked on several projects including automated trading bots, Starcraft AI for the ladder and tournament (e.g. SSCAIT), and text-to-speech (TTS) engines based on deep convolutional networks and guided attention, optimized to run in realtime under resource constraints.

Amal holds a dual BSc in Math and Computer Science from University of California, Los Angeles.