Hi, I'm Michael. My Chinese name is Zhucheng Tu (涂竹成). I'm a Research Engineer working on developing foundation models for recommendations, personalization, and search at Netflix since August 2024. Prior to that I was a Machine Learning Engineer in the AI/ML Information Intelligence org at Apple from January 2019 - August 2024, primarily working on open-domain question answering and search.

I graduated as a thesis-based Master's student from the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo in 2018, specializing at the intersection of natural language processing and information retrieval. During my Master's my focus was on semantic textual similarity and retrieval-based question answering. I was advised by Professor Jimmy Lin. I also completed my undergraduate studies at the University of Waterloo majoring in Software Engineering, graduating on the Dean's Honour's List in June 2017.

I enjoy building things end-to-end, doing whatever is needed to get the job done, whether it is modeling, infrastructure, data, or anything in-between.

My overarching goals have remained the same for many years: to be an earnest person whom can be relied upon and to never stop learning. I am interested in photography, travelling, skiing / snowboarding, reading, history, and astronomy.