Xiaming Chen

Ph.D. in Information and Communication Engineering
Visionary Data & AI Engineer · Cloud-Native Systems Architect · Open-Source Builder

📍 Shanghai, China
🌐 Blog: https://www.xiaming.site
💻 GitHub: https://github.com/caesar0301

I am a systems-oriented engineer and researcher driven by long-term thinking about how humans and machines compute, reason, and collaborate. With a dual background in optical physics and computer science, and nearly a decade of industry experience in cloud-native data and AI platforms since 2016, I focus on building infrastructures that bridge incremental engineering progress with more fundamental shifts in computational paradigms.

Inspired by large-scale systems such as data lakehouses and by multi-paradigm representations exemplified by projects like Wolfram Alpha, my work centers on unifying data analytics, AI workloads, and resource-aware execution into coherent, scalable systems. I combine academic rigor with production-grade engineering, aiming to push systems beyond short-term optimization toward enduring architectural clarity.

Professional Experience

Alibaba Cloud (Aliyun)

Senior Data & AI Engineer — MaxCompute / MaxFrame 2020 – Present

Core contributor to MaxCompute, Alibaba Cloud’s large-scale data warehouse and analytics platform.
Design and evolve cloud-native resource scheduling mechanisms to improve elasticity, fairness, and cluster utilization at scale.
Co-design MaxFrame, a unified Data-AI service that bridges large-scale data analytics and AI workloads.
Lead software–hardware co-optimization efforts across x86 and ARM, CPU and GPU execution paths, improving performance, stability, and cost efficiency for production systems.

Transwarp Inc.

Big Data Engineer
2016 – 2020

Joined the company during its rapid growth phase and worked on the core Transwarp Data Cloud platform.
Contributed to distributed computation frameworks, scheduling subsystems, and cloud-native infrastructure integration.
Developed strong hands-on expertise in large-scale system deployment, performance tuning, and data-intensive engineering in production environments.

Academic Background

Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Ph.D. in Information and Communication Engineering
2010 – 2016

Research focus: statistical modeling and large-scale data analysis for understanding complex systems.
Dissertation: modeling and characterization of human mobility patterns from large-scale network traffic data.
Supervised by Prof. Yaohui Jin, 📘 Ph.D Dissertation (Chinese)

Xidian University

B.S. in Optical Information Science and Technology
2006 – 2010

Solid foundation in optical physics, signal processing, and information systems.

Research & Publications

My academic work has been published in peer-reviewed international conferences and journals, including ICC, PAM, UIC, and ICTC (Google Scholar Profile). Representative research themes include:

Spatio-temporal data analysis and human mobility modeling
Data-driven pattern discovery and anomaly detection
Scalable computational methods for complex systems

Open-Source & Community

I actively engage in open-source and community initiatives that explore the foundations and future directions of data and AI systems:

awesome-public-data — Founder
A long-running community curating high-quality public datasets for research and education.
λCogito — Founder
An experimental community exploring computational logic, language theory, and next-generation data architectures.
cogents — Research prototypes on cognitive and agent-oriented systems
graphsim — Graph similarity and structural analysis algorithms

These efforts reflect my belief that meaningful system innovation emerges from open exploration beyond immediate production constraints.

Technical Skills & Interests

Architecture: Cloud-native systems (Kubernetes), large-scale scheduling, data lakehouse design
Data & AI Platforms: Data warehouses, Data-AI integration, heterogeneous workload execution
Performance Engineering: CPU/GPU co-optimization, resource-aware execution
Programming: Python, C/C++, Go and more
Research Interests: Computational intelligence, mathematical logic, cognitive systems, and AGI-oriented infrastructure

Personal Philosophy & Interests

I believe that genuine optimism lies in discovering meaning within the apparent aimlessness of life. My family is the anchor of my world and the quiet force behind my professional persistence and long-term vision.

Outside of work, I enjoy Chinese calligraphy, maintaining an aquarium, traveling, reading, and reflective thinking. I am deeply inspired by science fiction, especially Star Trek, theoretical physics, and the evolving narrative of human knowledge.

About