What is my Story?

Hi my name is Jùnchéng (Billy) Lì. 励骏成 I am currently a quantitative researcher at Two Sigma. I obtained my PhD in 2023 from CMU LTI. Before that, I spent four wonderful years at Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence. In total, I have spent nearly ten years working on deep learning and its applications in audio, speech, and multimodal data, with a recurring focus on robustness and failure modes.
I have always been fascinated by the power of machine learning, and at the same time haunted by how much of it can remain opaque even when it works. In the era of LLMs and modern AI systems, I choose to embrace this shift and fully take advantage of what these models can do. To me, the right response is neither blind worship nor reflexive skepticism, but learning quickly, adapting continuously, and staying open-minded as the frontier moves.
Over time, I have also come to believe that research greatly resembles value investing. We need to keep learning new things, diversify enough to stay resilient, and yet concentrate when we see a direction with real long-term potential. We do not have unlimited time or attention, so where we place our effort matters. This process requires patience, conviction, and the ability to revise our views when the world changes.
At the end of the day, I believe the most important things are intuition and taste: taste in choosing problems, taste in knowing what matters, and intuition for when a new idea, tool, or direction is worth taking seriously. Those qualities are hard to fake, and they become more valuable as the field moves faster.