🤔 The core inquiry that motivates my present and future works is: How do we cope with the collective inabilities of humans against the complex systems of contemporary society?

🕊️ I am deeply empathetic when a suboptimal solution to a problem in human history arises because we cannot process all the complex factors involved, and the equilibrium of our multi-agent social system has to resort to an outcome that makes most of us feel safe or fearful. Notable examples in recent history include the Eritrean-Ethiopian War, where Eritrea and Ethiopia were in a border dispute for a barren wasteland, a town called Badme. The dispute was largely driven by news media polarization, where each country’s leaders fought the war as fuels of nationalism dictate their inevitable positions to engage on war. It eventually results in 70k - 300k casualties and the two countries are still affected by the aftermass today.

🏰 Yet history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Similar mistakes include the international climate crisis and the COVID policy failures in China. The common pattern between these events is that the public decision-making systems have countless complex factors, and unfortunately, their complicated interactions often stabilize to an outcome that is suboptimal and appearing as “irrational” in hindsight. What happens under the hood is usually much more than just being “irrational”. It is a giant mass fused with inevitability, contingency, and inertia. While staying empathetic to such tragedies of our society, I seek for ways to quantify the systemic complexities beyond human minds, such that one day, we can process and leverage the complex systems for the collective welfare of humankind. With the exponentially accelerating advances of technologies, we will face more and more unseen challenges and the systems will become trickier to understand. I know that we probably won’t get an “analytical solution” to all these, but I am determined to find great “numerical solutions” and make them all interpretable to humans.

🦾 I set my feet on finding the computational and quantitative approaches to optimize our ways to run the legal system and develop public policies. I am also concerned with AI safety and governance, as it is an evolving and disruptive factor that exponentiate the complexities of our social system. In addition, I am deeply curious about the emergent properties of multi-agent systems and how we can leverage them to enhance public welfare. Often times, the approaches to these interdisciplinary problems are limited by the capabilities of foundation models, which also makes me interested in exploring the reasoning ability and high-dimensional representation of models over complex entities, such as case precedents, population network, and public institutions.