✦ WELCOME TO MY LITTLE PLANET

Hi, I’m
Ying Yao.

An ML engineer with a curious mind.
Exploring AI, building things, and connecting
the dots along the way.

Quest Log Inventory

Hangzhou, China

Quest Log.

· 3 min read

Gradient Descent vs Ordinary Least Squares

Working through linear regression from two angles: the iterative updates of gradient descent and the normal equation for ordinary least squares, with derivations and notes on when to use each.

Read article

About.

From patterns in data
to systems that learn.

My path has taken me from mathematics and statistics to energy forecasting and production ML. At Zoom, I helped build anomaly detection and root cause analysis systems.

These days, I’m exploring AI agents, memory, and reinforcement learning — and keeping notes as I go.

Agentic AIReinforcement learningAIOps

Education
M.S. Computer Science · Georgia Tech
M.S. Probability & Statistics · Carleton

Experience

  1. Zoom

    2021 — 2025

    Machine Learning Engineer · Hangzhou

    Built time series anomaly detection across 80+ services and 500+ monitors, alongside work on root cause analysis and agent workflows.

  2. BluWave-ai

    2019 — 2021

    Data Scientist · Ottawa

    Turned wind, solar, and energy demand data into forecasts for real-world energy decisions.

  3. Carleton University · CQADS

    2018 — 2019

    Research Associate · Ottawa

    Applied data science to forecasting, computer vision, and recommendation systems.

  4. TD Bank Group

    2016 — 2018

    BI & Reporting Analyst II · Ottawa

    Made reporting more useful — and reduced reporting time by over 30% through automation.

Research

Reinforcement learning meets sustainable land use in the Lake Malawi Basin.

2026 · Read the preprint

Inventory.

Rally

Your tennis game, remembered.

Training notes and video become a lasting memory of your game. Rally connects patterns across sessions and builds a personal briefing for the next time you step on court.

AI agentsLong-term memoryMultimodal

Qwen Cloud Hackathon · MemoryAgent track
Designed and built as a solo project.

GitHub Watch on YouTube

LLM-Wiki

My AI learning notes, connected.

Notes from Algorithm, Engineering, ML Course, and Alisa’s LLM notebook. Explore their connections and read the notes.

AI learningObsidianKnowledge graph
Open LLM-Wiki