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.