Chaoyang He

Co-founder and CTO at FedML, Inc. (FedML.ai)
Ph.D. in Computer Science
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA
Researcher at Meta, Google, Amazon (2018-2022)
R&D Manager and Principal Engineer at Tencent (2014-2018)
Senior Software Engineer at Baidu (2012-2014)

A lifelong learner with a strong passion and interest in scientific research, engineering, production, R&D team management, and entrepreneurship.

Dual vision in business and tech, research and product, US and China

ch [at] fedml.ai
chaoyanghe.com [at] gmail.com

Home: Palo Alto, California, 94303
Office: Sunnyvale, California 94085

Chaoyang He is Co-founder of FedML, Inc. (raised 13M+ USD in SEED round), a Silicon Valley-based company building machine learning infrastructure to train, serve, and deploy AI models easily, economically, and securely, with holistic support of high-performance ML libraries, user-friendly AIOps, and a well-managed distributed GPU Cloud. Previously, he worked closely with researchers/engineers at Google, Facebook, and Amazon. He was an R&D Team Manager and Principal Software Engineer at Tencent (2014-2018), a Team Leader and Senior Software Engineer at Baidu (2012-2014), and a Software Engineer at Huawei (2011-2012). He has received a number of awards in academia and industry, including the Amazon ML Fellowship (2021-2022), Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (2021-2022), Tencent Outstanding Staff Award (2015-2016), WeChat Special Award for Innovation (2016), Baidu LBS Group Star Awards (2013), and Huawei Golden Network Award (2012). His research focuses on machine learning, distributed systems, blockchain, edge/cloud computing, primarily distributed/federated machine learning, and efficient distributed training of large foundation models (LLM, Vision Transformer). For these topics, he has published papers at ICML, NeurIPS, CVPR, ICLR, AAAI, MLSys, and VLDB, among others. Besides pure research, he has experience in Internet-scale products and businesses such as Tencent Cloud, Tencent WeChat Automotive / AI in Car, Tencent Games, Tencent Maps, Baidu Maps, and Huawei Smartphone. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA, advised by Salman Avestimehr (USC), Professor Mahdi Soltanolkotabi (USC), Professor Murali Annavaram (USC), and Professor Tong Zhang (HKUST). More details are available at his homepage: https://ChaoyangHe.com

[Biography]

News

  • 06/01/2023: A new milestone: FedML Inc. has raised 13M+ USD with a high valuation, which is a significant milestone during this time of decreased market valuations. FedML is going beyond only federated machine learning solutions (remember “F” also stands for Foundation Model), and we will leverage the funding to further enhance our products in MLOps, LLMOps, distributed/federated AI (training/serving/app tooling), and innovations around an AI marketplace!
  • 01/01/2023: My Google Scholar Statistics: H-index 20+, Citations 5000+. This was done in just 3 years (my first paper submission is in 2020); before running a company, my topics cover in both machine learning and industrial grade systems: primarily in distributed training of foundation models, federated learning, NLP, and CV.
  • 04/01/2022: quantitative summarization of Ph.D. (as of March 2022): 30+ Publications, Google Scholar h-index 12, Citations 2500+, 1 US Patent, 2 PhD Fellowships from Amazon and Qualcomm, 5+ invited talks from Facebook, Amazon, Stanford, USC ISI; Funding raised with my advisors: several grants and startup (> $3M USD)
  • 03/25/2022: I passed my Ph.D. defense. See my acknowledgment here. The thesis manuscript is maintained here.
  • 09/01/2021: Thanks Amazon and Qualcomm for supporting my PhD with two fellowships.
  • 08/05/2021: Invited Talked at Stanford MLSys [youtube recording] about Distributed ML System and Federated Learning [slides].
  • 06/01/2020: [Family] Congratulations to my wife! She got her 2nd master’s degree in the US (from USC; yes, we are alumni for the 2nd time) and started to work in California.
  • 8/2/2018: Joined USC in August 2018. My family likes Los Angeles, it’s a great place to balance work and family.
  • 12/1/2017: I started to lead a Data Mining and data platform team at Tencent Cloud
  • 04/15/2017: I received PhD offers from CMU, USC, Georgia Tech, and UCSB.
  • 6/1/2015: I was promoted to Team Manager(L1-2) to manage a software development team including 10+ engineers.
  • 2012-2014: worked as a technical leader at Baidu
  • 2010-2011: I tried startups a few times, including building websites and mobile applications, but all failed; I also tried to go deep into academia, publish papers, and enhance my English (TOEFL/GREs), but no professors from the top 30 American universities accepted me. So I put my dreams on hold. Luckily, I didn’t give up and finally made it many years later… I’m so proud of my persistence.