你好啊陌生人 (Hello stranger), I'm Hengda 👋🏼

I’m a data scientist working for ZipRecruiter on Machine Learning (ML) models for the search engine.

I’m a member of the search team that powers the search engine and search experience. I’ve worked on building machine learning models to rerank retrieved results and understand the intent of user queries.

Prior to this role, I was a graduate student @ UCLA. I spent both my undergraduate and graduate life as a 🐻, and am sooo luckily being the centennial Class of 2019.

My passion mainly resides in the field of machine learning. I have worked on many different fields ranging from Graph Learning, Computer Vision (CV), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Information Retrieval (IR).

Being able to learn the techniques and details in each different area always helps me to connect the dots and finds the common ideas among these fields. Sometimes, you’d find the idea being very similar to a completely different work in another field. And that fascinates me the most 😆.

As you might have guessed, I’m originally from China. I’m from a city called Shenzhen and have lived there for the first 18 years! Shenzhen is best known as the Silicon Valley of China, as it is the home of many Chinese tech giant, like Tencent, Huawei, and DJI. I haven’t gone back for years and miss the city so much!

Growing up in a city surrounded by technology has definitely contributed to my choice of career. My dad was also a software engineer in his early career! I remember learning about a new programming knowledge called Prolog in college, and my dad was like: ‘Hey, I built a Prolog compiler in the 80’s as part of my Master’s thesis!’

Outside of work, I am still a complete nerd. I enjoy playing around with my home server and installing home automation gadgets, as well as doing side projects on machine learning. You may see me writing blogs on any of these contents and hopefully you enjoy them as I do 😎!