About me

Hi! I’m Zisheng Ye, i.e. 叶子盛 in Chinese. “Yezi”, which is the pinyin of the first two characters “叶子” in my name, means “leaf” in English. Since I enjoy my life in Macao - my second hometown, I give myself the nickname “macaoleaf”. I’m currently studying Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science at McGill University.

In 2016, AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol 4 - 1 in Go. Millions of Go players were shocked by its innovative and cold-hearted performance, including me (see one of my best matches against a 6-dan player here). I was not a newbee in computer science, and I knew the complexity of Go game would be out of AlphaGo’s reach if it applied normal searching methods. However, the strategy design and the growth of computation ability led to the astonishing result that completely blew up my mind. After that, I started to look into the technical details of AlphaGo, and this is where the story begins.

Being a typical engineer does not seem intriguing to me. Working in a big company might have some products with huge influence, but it is hard to tell what is exactly my contribution. I prefer to being a teacher. The society does not care much about one more engineer, but hundreds of them; I would be glad if I can lead my students to the amazing world of AI.

Therefore, pursuing a Ph.D. degree is a must. I’m always trying to take the most relevant courses to get more prepared. Currently, my research interests focus on differential privacy, transfer learning, federated learning and lifelong learning, but I am eager to grab every opportunity, to try something new, and to find new topics that I’m interested in.

If you are seeking a student as a research assistant, please don't hesitate to know more about me, and feel free to get in touch with me.