Hey, I'm Cheng-Wei Hu (胡程維). I'm currently based in San Francisco and building NotebookLM at Google Labs.
Previously, I studied Connective Media at Cornell Tech and Finance at National Taiwan University. Taipei and New York City are where I feel like home.
I'm a voracious learner interested in almost everything like cognitive science, philosophy, psychology, learning science, design, writing, memory, marketing, business strategy, decision making, and many more.
My bookshelf is a collection of books I find worth reading.
Things I'm involved with:
- Learning Science and Tools for Thought. I'm passionate about how to help people learn and think better using cognitive science and machine learning. For tools for thought, you might be interested in Revisiting Augmenting Human Intellect. I also love sharing digested thoughts through Weekly I/O and this blog.
- AR/VR/XR. I researched in the XR Collaboratory at Cornell, where I played with multiple projects related to Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Mixed Reality (XR), real-time 3D reconstruction, and remote collaboration. I've also built Apple Vision Pro apps, and won Dream XR hackathon by building a multiplayer social game with text-to-3D AI.
- Full-stack development. I self-taught programming and interned at Amazon, Grindr, and LINE TV to do both frontend and backend software development. I also built browser extension like Better Medium Stats to help over 1000 writers on Medium to get more insights from their article data.
- Indie Music. I'm an enthusiast who loves attending live concerts and festivals. I've also organized a music festival and some small music events before. Currently the three artists I listen to the most are Bon Iver, No Party for Cao Dong, and GorDoN .
- Basketball. I've been playing competitive basketball my whole life, and ten years on the varsity team molded who I am today. I can be extremely competitive sometimes.
- Philosophy. The philosophical tradition closest to my philosophy is pragmatism, though I prefer to call mine cherry-pickism. I hold conflicting ideas and beliefs as long as they are useful to me. Stoicism (or Buddhism from the religious world and REBT from the psychotherapy world) is the one I applied the most. Evolutionary psychology is the framework I use the most to explain or understand behavior. Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Spinoza, and Kant are some philosophers that I often consulted.
I've been very lucky to be interviewed by some talented friends about my thoughts and experiences. If you're curious, here are some links (all are in Mandarin): 電扶梯走左邊, VK科技閱讀時間, and 韓庭光.