Hi, I'm Michael. My formal name is Zhucheng Tu (涂竹成). I'm currently an engineer in the Information Intelligence group under the AI/ML organization at Apple, working on products spanning Siri, Spotlight, and Safari.

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. 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.

My primary interests focus on building real NLP/IR systems that can be deployed in production. Specifically, I am interested in working on systems and models that can find answers to knowledge-seeking questions from large unstructured text corpora. During my Master's my focus was on semantic textual similarity and retrieval-based question answering.

During the past I've completed internships at Uber (Fall 2016, fraud detection), Facebook (Winter 2016, Instagram data engineering), and Reflektion (Summer 2015 & Fall 2014, ML infrastructure and backend). One of my greatest strengths is having the skills to build end-to-end systems spanning all parts of the stack, from backend infrastructure (system architecture, databases and distributed systems), to building data warehouses and pipelines, to training and serving ML models, to the client.

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 enjoy photography, travelling, and reading.