Hi! My name is Tommy, or Jingtao Liu (/ˈdʒɪŋˈtaʊ/). I'm an engineer and designer who likes turning "what if?" into things people can try and experience.
These days, I work at the intersection of engineering and growth at Modular, shaping product experiences that help developers put open AI models to work.
I graduated from UIUC CS and was a student researcher at the Pixel Playgrounds Lab, focusing on HCI and EdTech. Before college, I had an 8-year journey of self-exploration: I worked as a software engineer, transitioned to freelance UI/UX design, and later co-founded an EdTech startup as the CTO.
My work mainly focuses on HCI, where I enjoy prototyping and tinkering with hardware and software applications to enhance productivity and creativity. Over the past decade, my cross-disciplinary background has enabled me to explore the many possibilities of human-machine interaction in both traditional fields (such as education) and emerging fields (such as computer vision and LLMs). I'm passionate about crafting tools for the future of computing. One specific direction I'm interested in is how mixed reality and the concept of "a communal computer" could revolutionize the way we work and live.
In my spare time, I enjoy taking photos and bouldering. One of my recent side projects explored the concept of “computational climbing.”