Core Team

At USCS, the birthplace of AdaBoost and Online Learning, Ziqi was advised by Prof. David P. Helmbold in theoretical machine learning and various algorithm applications, including the Go algorithm. Before that, he served as Principal Research Scientist at SFTC and was responsible for finite element mesh network generation methods, which were used in aerospace. Seasoned serial-entrepreneur, founder of Cortex Labs.

Jia worked at Baidu and Alibaba as architect of large recommender systems and so.com, a search engine with over 100 million daily active users. He went on to co-found multiple tech startups. His first company, Wolong Cloud, was acquired by Alibaba. He then joined Beijing Machine Learning Information Technology Co. as the CTO, where he led projects in recsys, chatbot, medical imaging etc. He later joined Pony.ai, an autonomous vehicle unicorn startup.

Chen is a tech startup investor and serial entrepreneur with business presence in North America, Asia, and South Africa. With more than 8 years of experience, Chen is an expert in renewable energy systems, sharing economy, and sustainable development. In 2016, Chen discovered the value of integrating blockchain technology into the renewable energy field. Chen has been invited to be the panelist and guest speaker at difference conferences and universities to promote AI smart contract adoption and sustainable development via distributed ledger technology.

An eminent mathematician, cryptographer, computer scientist and author, Whitfield is the winner of the Turing Award (recognized as "Nobel Prize of Computing") in 2015 and known for his pioneering work in public-key cryptography. He provides Cortex with support in trusted computing encryption technology.
As a world-renowned expert in cryptography and cybersecurity, he joined Sun Microsystems Laboratories in 1991 where he served as the Chief Security Officer and Vice President until November 2009.
After a long career at Sun Microsystems, where he became a Sun Fellow, Diffie has worked as visiting scholar and consulting scholar at various research institutions and labs including Stanford University, Zhejiang University, Cryptic Labs, and ICANN.

Currently a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Kris is advising Cortex on the blockchain economy and chip manufacturing design.
Kris is the founder of the global organization SRII which provides advisory services to major industry and government organizations regarding innovation in the digital economy. He has worked as a senior executive in Silicon Valley for more than 30 years, working with companies such as IBM, Intel and AMD. He was an Industry Fellow in the College of Engineering at UC Berkeley and an adjunct professor in the Electrical Engineering & Computer Science department at Santa Clara University, California.