About Wenlong

Hi there,

Thanks for your interest about me by viewing this page.

Below is the story about me, it is a journey all about dream chasing, change initiatives and repositioning in life:

When I was very little, don't remember the exact age, but from when I can remember things, I already had a dream, maybe impacted by science fiction movies, the robots in those movies are so powerful and omnipotent, so that I want to build robots myself someday.

To chase this dream, when I was in junior school, I already had interests on physics. I was impressed and attracted by how powerful the explanations and principles it presents to show the nature for the world we are living in, so I read the physical teaching books of my old brother who was in junior high school. As it goes most likely, when I was in junior high school, my physics is good.

Then I went to university, when choosing my major, I had no idea which major can help me to get the knowledge to build a robot, I was guessing that, robot seems need the mechanical knowledge to build its body, so I chose a major which belongs to machinery. I studied that major for one year, because my courses are good, then I got a chance to change my major inside of my university. I thought that, to build the powerful robots in movies seems need knowledge not only about machinery, but also knowledge about electronics and optics, as I already had some basic knowledge about machinery, I decided to learn more about others, so I chose to change my major to be optical information and technology, which belongs to optoelectronics department.

After another 3 years' learning, I still had no idea how to build a robot, so I decided to pursue my master degree in the major of automation, because I realized that, to make the robot move, it needs the knowledge of automatic control. During my learning, my supervisor heard that I love building robots, so she recommended me to a robot company for internship, although not work out, at least it made me had the chance to have a tour in that company and knew how the status of robot companies was. Then impression and experience are very bad, and it makes me realized that, it was not the mature time to join such a company yet, as the technology was not mature enough and most of the robot maker companies were still struggling to live.

Then I joined Intel to work on software for living, firstly as an intern, then as a RCG (Recent Campus Graduate) to work on website localization. At that time, Intel’s website localization was already using machine translation (from 3rd party companies) to help saving the translation cost. Very easily, I was attracted by how powerful the machine translation engine can do. So I initiated to request to build the machine translation engine from open source code for Intel, and luckily, it got approved. After that, I ever worked on Android, smart devices, and security (content protection).

When the time smart devices are hot, robot was also getting hot. Although started from the very beginning, I didn’t think the technology were mature yet to build a powerful enough robot, I still did some trying on those areas, and not surprisingly, failed. From that I know, the reason that why they failed, is because they are not ‘smart’ enough, yet. Or we can say, the computation power contained in such small chipset for wearables or robots, is not ‘smart’ enough to do something worth buying yet.

In 2016, because of an accidental opportunity, I saw the machine learning course of Andrew Ng in Coursera, and naturally, I know that this was what wearables and robots need next, and started to learn about that, including some other courses like deep learning and NLP (Natural Language Processing). What I was thinking was, I have learnt so many knowledge about making robot, but to make a robot, it needs too many areas of knowledge, if I focus on all, I will be expert for nothing, and many giant companies provided APIs for some robot functions already, and there is little chance I can do better than those APIs. Which means, To make robots, I need to focus on one area and become expert for that area, rather than to learn all the related knowledge domains about robot. So I choose AI, which is the core of robots, to make them smart and powerful. In 2017, I started to work on ADAS, in the meantime, AI was getting hotter and hotter. Until 2019, I moved on to work on Medical AI. Starting from the end of 2019, the COVID19 hit, and I worked from home for one year, by using Zoom meetings, which makes me think that the video conference area is a very promising area and there are lots of things AI can enhance, so I invented several patent in this area. And you know what, when you understand deeper, you will know that for AR/VR (since 2021 we call it metaverse), it is actually using similar technologies to make the virtual body move with the technologies of making real body (like robots) to move.

So recently in 2021, I joined Microsoft, to work on the AI based video effects for Microsoft Teams meeting! I think this is a very promising area and one of the most important entry points for metaverse (and robots).

And what’s next? I don’t know yet, but one thing for sure is, with my futuristic and innovative abilities, I will keep evolving, to the end of my life, targeting to my dream!

Thanks for reading such a long story, at the end, I would love to finish my story for now with some of my favorite sayings:
- Change is nature, the part that we can influence, and it starts when we decide. – from the movie《Ratatouille》
- Keep looking, don’t settle. – Steve Jobs
- The best way to predict the future is to invent it. – Alan Kay