Aaron Li

Founder, CEO

Before founding Qokka, Aaron worked at top AI R&D institutions. He focused on building technologies and algorithms with broad industrial applications, such as large-scale machine learning, text mining, topic modeling, reinforcement learning, and Bayesian mixture models. He built several software systems and products both as a technical leader and an individual contributor based on these technologies. These institutions include Scaled Inference (an AI-platform company founded by Google veterans), Google AI, NICTA, Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and others.

Aaron won multiple awards in AI, such as the Best Research Paper Award from ACM SIGKDD, a top conference that gathers thousands of leading researchers from tens of countries in machine learning and data mining. Many prominent technology firms have also adopted some technologies developed by Aaron in their products and AI research, which increased both the speed and scale of topic modeling, opinion mining and visualizations by orders of magnitudes.

Aaron received a research MSc in Language Technologies at Carnegie Mellon University and BSc (1st class honors) at Australian National University with quadruple majors in Computer Science, Computer Science, Mathematics, and Statistics. Aaron lived and studied in Beijing (China), New Zealand, Australia, Pittsburgh (USA), before moving to and settled in San Francisco, California. He was one of the very few self-represented immigrants granted with "Alien of Extraordinary Ability" residency from the US government.

Nina Wei

Product

Previously, Nina was incubating an AI-powered product at deeplearning.ai. Prior to that, she designed and launched multiple AI-powered products leveraging automatic speech recognition and natural language processing technologies at Silicon Valley AI Lab at Baidu Research. She was granted patents for multiple designs, and published papers in collaboration with Stanford researchers in IEEE Pervasive Computing and ACM Interactions. She is currently working on projects at the intersection of mental health and AI in collaboration with a Stanford lab. 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 in China.

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.