Connecting The Dots

On 12 May 2023, Zhang Ce successfully defended his dissertation, entitled “Document Graph Representation Learning”. The gist of it is to derive more holistic representations of documents by incorporating both their textual content as well as their network connectivity to other documents.

His first publication on this topic, AdjacentEncoder, was presented at the AAAI-20 conference. New York then was Zhang Ce’s first trip to the United States.

Zhang Ce and Hady’s appointment with the Lady of Liberty on a cold winter day

Perhaps that’s a sign for things to come. After a series of publications during Covid which were presented online, his next few conference trips were all to “The Land of Opportunity”, ICML-22 in Baltimore, KDD-22 in Washington DC, and NeurIPS-22 in New Orleans. It is fitting that his immediate plan post-graduation is to pursue opportunities in the US.

Zhang Ce (far left) joined the group lunch with Tumpeng, after arriving just a couple of days before this photo was taken

Time really flies. It was just five years ago when he joined Preferred.AI after graduating top of his cohort at Sichuan University. Since then, through various trials and tribulations, he emerges triumphant with some of the most impressive academic record forged during a PhD study.

Post-defense celebration with a group lunch at the Whole Earth

After the defense, we had lunch as a group at a plant-based restaurant called Whole Earth. Perhaps it’s a proverbial allusion to his aspiration for what he considers success in life: 桃李满天下.

His favorite saying is “Where there is a will, there is a way.” If you are anyone familiar with him, you’ll know that his iron will will take him all the way.