Hi, I'm Michael. My Chinese name is Zhucheng Tu (涂竹成). I'm an engineer working under Information Intelligence in AI/ML at Apple. I work on problems involving open-domain question answering and search. Nowadays, I primarily write code in Python and Go, and primarily use JAX and PyTorch for modeling.

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 apply advances from state-of-the-art research to 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 infra and backend). One of my strengths is being able build systems from end-to-end across the entire stack, from modeling, to infrastructure / backend, 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 am interested in photography, travelling, skiing, reading, history, and astronomy. I am currently learning snowboarding, playing the guitar, and playing hockey.