Work & Research

Production systems and research exploring how models work with structure, tools, and real-world constraints.

Nova Agent

Production agents · Insurance

An insurance AI coworker for complex document workflows, artifact generation, and operator review.

Agent system design and production engineering around tools, documents, permissions, and domain-specific failure modes.

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TikTok coding agent

Developer tooling · Code migration

Built an internal LLM agent for Objective-C to Swift migration, with generation loops and custom evaluation harnesses.

Built the agent from scratch and iterated on prompts, generated code, and evaluations with engineering usefulness as the criterion.

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FineEdit

Findings of EMNLP 2025

Research on precise, instruction-driven editing in structured domains including code, LaTeX, and database languages.

Co-authored research on targeted modifications; the public blog does not specify individual authorship responsibilities or benchmark results.

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TreeDiff

SURGeLLM at ACL 2026

AST-guided code generation with diffusion language models, treating code as a structured object.

Research connecting syntax structure and diffusion-based code generation. See the paper for the methods and measured results.

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Further research

Infant Agent

A tool-integrated, logic-driven agent design with memory, task-aware functions, and cost-aware API usage.

RED

Real-time scheduling for robotic inference under changing environmental dynamics. RTSS 2023; the journal extension was listed as under review in the source biography.

Web accessibility research

Constraint solving and optimization for finding and repairing accessibility issues in web applications, with Yi Liu and Prof. Yepang Liu's lab.

Experience

Newfront / WTW

From October 2025 (as published)

Insurance AI systems, Nova Agent, and quoting and placement services.

Tira AI

Summer 2025

Co-founded an AI-native execution startup with Sam Liu. The public account reports top-10% YC S25 feedback, not YC admission.

TikTok

Before October 2025

Consumer mobile product systems and an internal LLM coding agent for Objective-C to Swift migration.

Ansys

May–August 2022

Digital Twin internship: frontend, APIs, and browser-compatible deployment workflows for Twin Deployer.

University of Pittsburgh

Research beginning in 2021

Web, mobile, data collection, visualization, and low-code rehabilitation research platforms in Prof. Dan Ding's lab.

Ant Group / Alibaba

July 2020–June 2021

Alipay financial product systems, low-code infrastructure, live-streaming components, and backend services.

SUSTech

2016–2020

Computer science degree, GAN-based face generation with Prof. Ran Cheng, and web accessibility research.

Education

  • University of Pittsburgh — MS, Information Science, 2021–2023
  • Southern University of Science and Technology — BEng, Computer Science and Technology, 2016–2020

Complete résumé · Projects · Contact Tao