Kelly Zheng
Hi, thanks for visiting!
I work to make autonomous systems that are beneficial to humanity and open-source tools so that more researchers can help. In my research, I think about existing knowledge of natural systems and how to augment that computationally.
I'm currently a PhD student co-supervised by the fantastic Dr. Roydon Fraser and Dr. Jesse Thé. We're working on developing spatiotemporal models of nature using quantum machine learning.
I am the co-founder of Coastal Carbon. We measure ocean biomass like seaweed using satellites and AI. Seaweed farmers use our measurements to claim blue carbon credits, 10x-ing their profit. We’re currently running pilots in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.
My background is in process controls, modelling, and simulation. My undergrad was from the University of Waterloo where I graduated with a BASc in chemical engineering and a minor in artificial intelligence. Over my degree, I interned with Hatch Controls, Automation & Electrical and Cameco Key Lake Uranium Refinery. I've also had the opportunity to learn from some incredible people as part of the 2019 AI4Good cohort at MILA, the 2018 Global Engagement cohort at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, and the 2017 Canada's Next 36 cohort.
News
2023
[07/14] Grandmother’s Choice Award at StartupFest, Montreal QC
[06/23] ThriveFoward Sustainability Grant from NCFDC ($25,000)
[06/07] SOA AI Grant from the Sustainable Ocean Alliance ($9,000)
[05/28] Paper in Atmosphere, “A Quantum Machine Learning Approach to Spatiotemporal Emission Modelling”
[05/16] OceanMBA at the MIT Sloan School of Management, Cambridge MA
[05/09] Profile by the University of Waterloo
[05/09] Panel at CWOIL 2023, St. John’s NL
[05/01] NSERC CGS-D Scholarship from the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada ($105,000)
[05/01] President’s Graduate Scholarship from the University of Waterloo ($10,000)
[03/12] Rising Tide Award from the International Marine Protected Areas Conference
[02/03] Pitch and booth at IMPAC5, Vancouver BC
[26/01] Profile by Velocity, “Exploring the underwater world to combat climate change”
2022
[12/06] Poster at Conference on Vision and Intelligent Systems
[11/27] Upstart Award from the University of Waterloo and Waterloo Commercialization Office ($15,000)
[09/01] Entrepreneurial PhD Fellowship Award from the University of Waterloo Conrad School of Business ($35,000)
[08/12] Category 1 (Passed!) PhD Comprehensive Examinations. Big thanks to my committee Dr. Achim Kempf, Dr. Michael Fowler, Dr. Xiaoyu Wu and chair Dr. Mark Pritzker.
[05/01] President’s Graduate Scholarship from the University of Waterloo ($10,000)
[05/01] Ontario Graduate Scholarship from the Province of Ontario ($45,000)
Notable Books
“No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place” - Isaac Babel
FF: For Fun // CC: Coastal Carbon // RR: Research
2023 Spring/Summer FF: Land and ownership.
[current] Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer
[04/27] Land: How Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World, Simon Winchester
- No matter where you are when you're reading this, you're on land that's owned by somebody. Even if that somebody is you, that's not the final word. You almost certainly still need to continue paying for the privilege of occupancy, in the form of things like real estate taxes. And not all the mortgage payments or real estate taxes in the world will protect you if your government decides to exercise its version of eminent domain and simply seize that land out from underneath you for its own purposes.
- A quarter of the world's population lives on land in which, though the individual citizens may not know it, they exist in a notionally feudal relationship with the British Crown.
- Most aboriginal people believed no one owned land - it was communal property. How did we change from that accepted policy of most of the ancients to the accepted practice of individual or government ownership of property today? Some modern countries declare all of their land is owned by the national government alone, Israel being one of those, apparently, as well as China, North Korea and Russia.
- “This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.” - from Chief Sealth’s letter to President Pierce on a treaty giving much of what is now Washington state over for white settlement
- Land is under threat like never before in human existence. Thanks to global warming, sea levels and tides are rising, and the pattern seems to have only one direction. The trivial-sounding inundations of the recent past are recognized for what they truly were: auguries of a certain kind of global doom.
[04/20] Civilizations, Laurent Binet
- Alternative history from Binet that re-imagines conquest, dominance, and colonization inspired by Boucheron's Histoire du monde au XVe siècle that discussed alternative histories of the world.
- One way to interpret Binet’s story is in terms of sociology, particularly the sociology of religion. He uses the Lisbon earthquake of 1531 as the equivalent of the Aztec smallpox epidemic in 1520 that eliminated resistance to the Spanish and rapidly led to the destruction of the Mexican Empire. Both events would seriously undermine the fundamental, mostly unconscious, presumptions of the respective cultures.
- Perhaps that is the real merit of this kind of alternative history. It reveals the presumptions that we unconsciously maintain about what is normal, moral, valuable, and important. That God (or the gods) speaks in natural catastrophe is a commonplace of religion. But what he (or they) means depends on the happenstance of the human interaction that follows.
- The meaning of the world is the real core of something called metaphysics, the study of existential significance, which is a social as much as an academic enterprise. Metaphysics is certainly not a popular topic of conversation; but the expression of metaphysical reality, namely ritual, is. It is our ritual, both religious and their secular derivatives, that institutionalize, as it were, what is beyond language, rationality and analysis into our most intimate personal and communal being.
- Ritual isn’t only observable in our religious or political events. Ritual is contained in the clothes we wear (or don’t), the layout of our dwellings, artistic themes and styles, and of course in the myriad of social behaviours we use every day, from how we shop and pay for the items we buy to the physical distance that is considered acceptable between us while we do these things. Language is mostly ritual in the greetings and small talk we engage in. Ritual pervades government and its processes - the three part government of the United States, for example, owes much to the interpretation of the Christian Trinity by a bunch of 18th century deists. Our laws reflect, for ill as well as good, our religious heritage - for example in the primacy of males, belief in retributive justice, and in court judgments of equity.
- So metaphysics is not some hidden, arcane philosophy of being. It is apparent, public, and pervasive. Ultimately it determines what constitutes a fact, that is, reality itself. What prevents us from realizing this is an absence of contrast - there is nothing to experience except what is already literally inculturated within us. Until someone like Binet comes along and allows us to see our own metaphysical eye.
2023 Spring CC: Negotiating our term sheets.
[05/30] Venture Deals, Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson
- (1) Control (2) Economics
- Ch4-8 for disambiguation of provisions in the term sheet
[04/22] Negotiation, Deepak Malhotra and Max Bazerman
- Negotiation is about consistently negotiating successful deals while still maintaining integrity and strengthening relationships and reputation.
- Cookbook on creating and claiming value in a negotiation. Not always a zero-sum activity, can log roll to find value for each party.
- Investigative negotiation: ask why, probe for deeper motivations. Focus on each party’s underlying interests and seek to create common ground. Don’t ask what, it’s a distraction. Seek to reconcile interests, not demands. Demands = opportunities. Don’t let negotiations end with a rejection of your offer. Always ask for an explanation!
2022/2023 Fall/Winter RR/FF: CDL Reading Group - On Being Human.
[02/28] Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in LLMs, Co-writing Screenplays and Theater Scripts Alongside LMMs using Dramatron
[02/21] Exhalation, Ted Chiang
[02/15] Training Language Models to Follow Instructions with Human Feedback, On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models, Prompt Engineering from Cohere, The need for Humanity in AI, Aidan Gomez on Commercializing Generative AI and the Moment the Public Tuned In
[01/17] The Paper Menagerie, Ken Liu
[11/30] The 21 Second God, Peter Watts
[11/23] The Future Library, Peng Shepherd
[11/16] Of God and Machines: The Future of AI is Neither Utopian nor Dystopian - it’s Something Much More Interesting, Stephen Marche
[11/09] What We Owe The Future, William MacAskill
2022 Fall RR: Cleveland Clinic NeuroDesign Workshop - Pain and the Stanford Biodesign Process
[10/01] Explain Pain, David Butler and Lorimer Moseley
[09/22] Biodesign: The Process of Innovating Medical Technologies, Paul Yock
2022 Summer FF: Post-Comprehensive Exam Treats at Haunted Bookstore, Sidney
[08/15] This is Your Mind on Plants, Michael Pollan
[08/14] Lessons in Chemistry, Bonnie Garmus
2022 Spring FF: Getting Covid in Palm Springs (thinking about climate change instead of going to Coachella)
[04/24] The Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson
[04/22] Deserts: A Very Short Introduction, Nick Middleton
Pre-2022
There is No Antimemetics Division, qntm
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, Lori Gottlieb
The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, Abdurraqib Hanif
Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art
Why We Sleep: Unlocking The Power of Sleep and Dreams, Matthew Walker
Value: Building a Better World for All, Mark Carney
There There, Tommy Orange
The Back of the Turtle, Thomas King
Mind Over Mood, Dennis Greenburger
Foundation, Isaac Asimov
Think: Simon Blackburn
The Winners, Fredrick Bachman
Anxious People, Fredrick Bachman
A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles
Educated, Tara Westover
Wherever You Go, There You Are, John Kabatt Zinn
The Three Body Problem, Liu Cixin
Stories of Your Life, Ted Chiang