Aaron Li

Founder, CEO

Aaron is the founder at Qokka, an AI startup that helps companies zero in on customers and communities using communication data at large scale. Previously, Aaron was a founding engineering lead at Scaled Inference, where he created one of the first generalized autonomous optimization platform for commercial use. Aaron briefly worked at Google AI, NICTA, and CMU where he created and perfected one of the first constant-time, large scale topic modeling algorithms for industrial use, which became quickly adopted among top tech firms.

Aaron won multiple awards in AI, including KDD Best Research Paper Award for his contribution in topic modeling and machine learning. Aaron received a research MSc in Language Technologies at Carnegie Mellon University, and BSc (1st class honors) at Australian National University in Computer Science, Computer Science, Mathematics, and Statistics. Aaron has innate interest in tech. He started coding at the age of 7, and started mining Bitcoin in 2011.

Aaron lived in Beijing, New Zealand, Australia, before he moved to and settled in the US, where he represented himself in his petition for one of the most challenging green card category. He has a keen interest in law and litigation and devoted a significant amount of time studying law and using it in practice.

Here is a selected list of publications and presentations from Aaron.

Nina Wei

Co-founder, Product

Nina was incubating an AI-powered product at deeplearning.ai. Prior to that, she designed and launched multiple AI-powered products at Silicon Valley AI Lab at Baidu Research.

She holds a MS in Human-Computer Interaction and Design from the University of Washington, and completed a BS in Applied Psychology while doing HCI research at Zhejiang Sci-Tech University and Chinese Academy of Sciences. she was granted patent for multiple innovative designs, and authored a diverse portfolio of publications ranging from blog articles on Medium by invitation from multiple journals, scholarly articles in top venues such as IEEE Pervasive Computing and ACM Interactions.

Haolin Jiang

Software Engineer

Haolin has over 10 years of experience as a full stack engineer, which he spent the majority of his time as a core lead developer at Agile Digital in Australia. responsible for design and implementation of many systems ranging from smart farming solutions for Grain Growers, one of Australia's largest and oldest agricultural organizations, to VR / AR tools used by creative studios to deliver the next generation of shopping experience in some of the largest shopping malls in Australia. Haolin was also a key developer in multiple startups providing smart retail solutions, such as PotatOS (which he partnered with Aaron) and DataPOS.

Haolin holds a BSc (Honours) in Information Technology from Australian National University, and is currently on leave from MSc in Software Engineering.

Jason Hong

Professor, Carnegie Mellon University

Jason is a professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, part of School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Jason was a co-founder at Wombat Security Technologies (acquired by Proofpoint in 2018 for $225M).

Jason has been a long time advisor to Qokka, since the product and technologies were still being developed at CMU.

Jason's research has been featured in the New York Times, MIT Tech Review, CBS, CNN, Slate, the World Economic Forum, and more. Jason is on the editorial board for ACM Transactions on Human Computer Interaction and the Communications of the ACM, and previously IEEE Pervasive Computing. He is an author of the book The Design of Sites, a popular book on web design using web design patterns. Jason received his PhD from Berkeley and his undergraduate degrees from Georgia Institute of Technology. Jason has participated on DARPA's Computer Science Study Panel (CS2P), is an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, a Kavli Fellow, a PopTech Science fellow, a New America National Cybersecurity Fellow, and previously held the HCII Career Development fellowship.