Hey there, I'm Allen and this is where I share thoughts and learnings (when I remember).

I was born in Japan, raised mostly in China, and moved to New York for high school. I earned my Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Computer Science from UCLA, and now I'm living and working in the Bay Area. I speak English, Chinese, and some Japanese, which has allowed me to develop an international perspective on things and opened up different opportunities.

For work, I mostly focus on ML/AI. Right now, I lead ML for FB Profile, where we drive impact on the profile surface and across other surfaces like news feed, search/typeahead, notifications, Instagram, GenAI, etc.

Before that, I worked on ads ML at TikTok, where I was responsible for all manual targeting products (like age/gender, interests, and many more) and also worked on auto targeting and improving ads retrieval and ranking. And before that, I worked on fraud/integrity ML at Mercari, using ML to prevent bad things from happening on the ecommerce platform, and worked on various ML and product initiatives at startup.

If you have questions or just want to chat or connect, you can reach out via LinkedIn (not a big user but will sometimes check).