Tianqi holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, where he was a member of ACM Class, now part of Zhiyuan College in SJTU. He did his master’s degree at Changhai Jiao Tong University in China on Apex Data and Knowledge Management before joining the University of Washington as a PhD. He has had several prestigious internships and has been a visiting scholar including: Google on the Brain Team, at Graphlab authoring the boosted tree and neural net toolkit, at Microsoft Research Asia in the Machine Learning Group, and the Digital Enterprise Institute in Galway Ireland. What really excites Tianqi is what processes and goals can be enabled when we bring advanced learning techniques and systems together. He pushes the envelope on deep learning, knowledge transfer and lifelong learning. His PhD is supported by a Google PhD Fellowship.