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 |
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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) |
Nov 2023 | Released HelpSteer: Multi-attribute Helpfulness Dataset for SteerLM (NAACL 2024) |
Aug 2023 |
Architected Humanoid Agents Simulation Platform (EMNLP 2023 System Demo) |
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 |
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 🥈 |