Who am I

My name is Lei Mao, and I am a Deep Learning Engineer at NVIDIA. My research and engineering interests are mainly in the areas of machine learning, artificial intelligence, general computer science, and user-friendly software engineering.

Before I joined NVIDIA, I graduated from the University of Chicago with a master degree in Computer Science, and did my part-time research at Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC). I also hold a master degree in Biochemistry from Duke University and a bachelor degree in Biotechnology from Dalian University of Technology in China.

I am a perfectionist. I want to solve the problems in my hands in perfect ways, which is, however, not achievable in many situations. I also apply Bellman Equation in the optimization of my life, which is a Markov decision process, but the future discount factor $\gamma$ in the equation might be small and I would often be trapped in local optimum.

Career Change

I was trained as a scientist, but I am more skeptical than any other scientists. I was not convinced that life science could be considered as “science” at the current level of human civilization when I was at Duke University. That was part of the motivations which caused me to leave that field. I should be grateful that I have learned mathematics and programming well in college, and I met machine learning when I was at the lowest point of my life.

With the help from MOOC, the coursework at the University of Chicago, and the research opportunities at TTIC, I was able to quickly catch up. Now, I am versatile enough to do both state-of-the-art research and engineering for machine learning, deep learning, and more general computer science.

About This Site

This website was formally built in the spring of 2017, but the style of the site has been changed several times.

The main purposes of this website are listed here:

Discuss the mathematics and the technical details of machine learning, deep learning, and computer science theories
Document the implementation of algorithms for solving real problems
Present my independent research projects
Record my personal achievements
It should be noted that all the contents of this website are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.

Citations

If you would like to cite the blog posts and articles in this site or repositories on my GitHub, please use the URLs. I would not change the URLs, unless someday GitHub does not exist.