my journey

from Chemistry to Education to AI - sharing a little to support other inter-disciplinary researchers getting into AI

An interview where I share some of my inspirations and motivations on this journey! Feel free to listen as podcast.

Milestones

Jun 2025 Collaborated on Litmus-Testing AI Values Prioritization with AIRiskDilemmas
May 2025 Open-sourced HelpSteer3-Preference across Diverse Tasks and Languages
Feb 2025 Released HelpSteer3: Feedback-Edit Data for General-Domain Test-Time Scaling (ACL 2025)
Nov 2024 Curated Divergence-Preferences: When do Annotators Disagree? (ICML 2025)
Oct 2024 Built HelpSteer2-Preference & Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B models w/ 1M+ downloads (ICLR 2025)
Jun 2024 Released HelpSteer2: Top-performing Open-source Reward Model Dataset (NeurIPS 2024 Dataset)
Mar 2024 Open-sourced NeMo-Aligner: Scalable Toolkit for Model Alignment (COLM 2024) GitHub stars
Nov 2023 Released HelpSteer: Multi-attribute Helpfulness Dataset for SteerLM (NAACL 2024)
Aug 2023 Architected Humanoid Agents Simulation Platform (EMNLP 2023 System Demo) GitHub stars
Jun 2023 Wrote SteerLM: a user-steerable alternative to RLHF (EMNLP 2023 Findings)
Jan 2023 Released + Maintained NeMoLLM: Python Client for NVIDIA LLM Service on PyPI
May 2022 Released + Maintained NeMo Dialogue Module for tasks x models flexibility GitHub stars
Dec 2021 Joined NVIDIA Applied Research team (NLP/LLM/Conversational AI) as Applied Scientist
Oct 2021 Wrote Uncovering Surprising Event Boundaries in Narratives (NAACL 2022 Workshop)
Sep 2021 Graduated from MS Computational Linguistics from the University of Washington
Aug 2021 Co-organized the Personal Knowledge Graphs Workshop at AKBC 2021
Jun 2021 Wrote Extracting and Inferring Personal Attributes from Dialogue (ACL 2022 Workshop)
Jan 2021 Wrote How to be Helpful on Online Support Forums? (NAACL 2022 Workshop)
Sep 2020 Finished Software Engineering internship at Amazon Alexa AI Knowledge!
Jul 2020 Graduated from BA Psychology and Education from the University of Cambridge
Nov 2019 Wrote Sub-quadratic user similarity clustering on Reddit (EMNLP 2019 Workshop)
Dec 2018 Closed EdTech startup to focus on higher-impact NLP Research (in Education/Psychology)
Jan 2017 Started an EdTech startup helping 500k+ Chemistry students on learnAh.org
Sep 2016 Read 100+ books on Education and related topics (Psychology, Sociology, Policy)
Jan 2016 Decided that improving quality of education is the highest impact career I can have
Aug 2015 Top 20 Global Finalist at Google Science Fair with my project on Zinc-Air Batteries 🔋
Jan 2015 Taught Chemistry and Biology at Anglo-Chinese School (Secondary/Middle School)
Jan 2014 Sliver Medalist at Singapore Chemistry Olympiad (SChO) and invited for IChO training team 🥈