Hi, I'm Michael. My formal name is Zhucheng Tu (涂竹成). I'm currently an engineer working on Siri at Apple.

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 natural language processing and building software systems that enable information retrieval and NLP technologies to be deployed. Specifically, I am interested in working on models and developing intelligent systems that can find answers to 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.