It is 6 30 pm here in Redmond Washington but on the other side of the world in shanghai it is like
10 30 a.m and so i'm going to be chatting with Zihao who is a Microsoft student
ambassador and an mvp and he has an insane video channel in china where he's teaching
like hundreds of thousands of people how to code and how to get started in artificial intelligence
and the community that he's managed to build up in a really short period of time
is just amazing to me and so I had to sit down with him to hear about what he's doing
how we got into coding and what his code story is so let's uh let's check it out
hey how are you yeah hi thanks for this opportunity awesome fantastic well tell
us a little bit about yourself um hi my name is Zihao a student from tongji university shanghai
and i have a video channel about artificial intelligence machine learning python programming
deep learning computer vision and raspberry pi and have many tutorials of Azure and cognitive
service such as custom vision I'm looking forward to sharing my experience about technology open
source content creation and community. I love it, I love it. So we were talking a little bit
earlier and you were telling me about how you got into computer science and programming and
it's a little bit different than what you were planning on doing when you went to college so
tell me a little bit about how you switched your focus areas i majored in civil engineering when
i was an undergraduate to be honest at that time i hate coding i never write a single
line of code my major civil engineering focuses on all kinds of construction and infrastructure
such as design and build architecture house tunnel bridge and the railway nothing but mechanics and
dynamics the thing changed in 2018 when i was an exchange student in the university of Pennsylvania
there was a lecture in Wharton school inviting the CEO of Microsoft Satya Nadella he shared his
insights about blockchain quantum computing as well as open source communities such as GitHub
most people sort of say it's the ai versus the human i think we have to sort of first grab hold
of all the opportunities ai creates to empower humans later i found GitHub this amazing website
i learned lots of open source toolkits such as vs code keras even bitcoin on this website in GitHub
you can collaborate with developers all over the world and i started to study python programming
data analysis algorithms machine learning ai deep learning computer vision front-end development
with eager and hunger of course that was not an easy way i used to get stuck in a python bug
or dealing with data structure issues for the whole afternoon or the whole day at the same time
i started to write technical blogs and make technical videos and and so you were making
these videos and writing these blogs because you didn't want other people to have to maybe struggle
the way that you were struggling in the beginning right my first video was about convolutional
neural networks let's break through algorithms in deep learning and the computer vision
help us to do image classification objective detection and image recognition later i found
myself good at making this kind of hardcore tutorials and the more and more subscribers
make me more confident and i think this could be the career of my lifetime we aim to help
zero beginner and the cross-field learners like me quickly master data mining machine learning ai
in easy to understand the way and quickly apply what they have learned into real scenario
projects i love that actually my video channel covers all kinds of fields related to
computer science especially in computer vision my video channel covers mathematics machine learning
basics deep learning neural networks computer vision python programming data analysis data
visualization and edge computing especially we focus on computer vision because computer vision
is telling a computer how to extract information or recognize information from images or videos
and the computer vision also called cv is a basic application in artificial intelligence
it contains image classification object detection semantic segmentation instance segmentation and
also object tracking 3d vision let me show you an example okay this is object detection
object detection means drawing rectangle boxes on an image and with this algorithm you can do fine
tuning and transfer learning if you are a doctor you can use this algorithm to detect tumors and
pneumonia on x-rays and if you are a farmer you can use this algorithm to detect a crop disease
that depends on you this can empower lots of fields and a lot of professions and is widely used
in different scenarios and a lot of students from traditional majors they can really benefit from
computer vision that's such a good you know demo and a good visualization of what you're doing what
i guess kind of led you to continuing to create these videos were you making them as you were
as you were continuing to learn exactly more and more people in china like me especially students
from those traditional majors such as mechanical finance they want to get into the it world too
they want to use advanced machine learning to empower their own profession and their
own major i think with my experience i believe i can really help them simplify the learning curve
let me show you another example i major in civil engineering and especially high-speed railway
and the chinese have a huge high-speed railway and urban railway system and how
to detect and maintain the health of this kind of infrastructure is of vital importance that's what
i can do to break the ceiling of the traditional engineering this video is detected railway track
shelling tracking checking damage corrugation and the fatigue fracture on the running surface of the
railway and we can expect that in the future everything is related to data and everything
is data-driven yeah no we were talking about that earlier about how important you think it is that
people actually try things in order to learn them and that that's how you've learned a lot is by
by doing things can you talk a little bit about that for example if you are an agriculture expert
or a farmer this is a traditional job with a long history you can utilize new technologies such as
uav drones remote sensing and computer vision to do lots of things breaking the selling of
traditional agriculture now you don't even need to write code or learn algorithms there are lots
of out of box toolkit such as custom vision in azure cognitive service you can just upload your
data sets train and deploy the ai models just by clicking your mouse this is also a demo to do the
crop disease image recognition if you are a farmer or an expert in agriculture you just need to
upload your photos and the artificial intelligence will detect and recognize which disease does
your crop have with high accuracy and the high precision i love that and you have you have 340
000 subscribers across different platforms is that right yeah and in the future there will be more
which is incredible but and you started doing this in what 2018
yeah i started from 2018 but during the pandemic the online education became more and more popular
that's how i get more popular it would make sense that students especially would really get value
out of your channel and especially the fact that you know you present things in an interesting way
and you use real world examples so it makes total sense that this is where a lot of your subscribers
have come from also like just like i said before you don't need to write code or even you don't
need to learn algorithm because there are already many out of the box toolkit such as custom vision
in every cognitive service you just upload your data and the error will help you handle everything
help you train or deploy the models you just need to click the mouse curious we were talking earlier
and you said that there haven't been a lot of resources for people in china who speak mandarin
to you know learn we have a lot of documentation in english but not as much in in mandarin so
has that been a good opportunity for you i have made a series of videos to help you
read academic paper of artificial intelligence especially computer vision i took detailed notes
of every formula every graph every reference the paper and what's so interesting you know you're
showing these papers that you've annotated in chinese you've added these notes but you were
telling me that some of your content that you create in in chinese has actually been translated
into other languages for for other people in other parts of the world have you had a lot of people in
your community helping contribute to your content as well yeah actually i have a whole i have a big
team the team member not only from my own team my own school but also from my subscribers in all
kinds of fields and all kinds of professions i love that you're focusing on all those
ways to to you know get the most out of what you're doing and then also helping people
in all parts of the world potentially be able to do that too it's not just
one thing which is what makes open source so great is that it can be global and it's what
makes the community that you're building so great so in addition to having your your video channels
and your tutorials i know that you also work as a an mvp and a microsoft student ambassador can you
tell me a little bit about the work that you do there microsoft supports microsoft student club
in hundreds of universities in china also in my college tonji university shanghai we have
the opportunity to work with microsoft experts from microsoft research asia also called msra
on various cutting-edge projects we make a whole open source community of ai education called aiedu
let me show you a github page that's awesome and also there are many chinese
college students take part in this open source repository and contribute themselves and mvp
means most valuable professional and mvp is the technical expert and community leader as well as
open source advocates not only do they write blogs and make videos but also they will give feedback
on microsoft products and we also take part in important activities in the community such as
microsoft ignite conference a microsoft build connect conference ai bootcamp and i'm msa means
microsoft student ambassador and msa members come from university students all over the world many
of them are college students you can make friends with them and you can communicate technical issues
and even report a bug that's awesome have you made a lot of friends um in in the community yeah and
msa members from all over the world i love that i love that i i have a question for
you for if somebody is whether they're a student or maybe they're just looking to
get started what's your advice for someone who is coming from a different background you know
like you who wasn't a a typical computer science major what's your advice for them on on getting
started here is the learning path i recommend you need to take four crucial steps and the first is
mathematics such as linear algebra probability statistics and calculus and the second step is
coding and the programming i recommend python and javascript and python is popular not only because
it's it's a very easy to learn programming language but also they have python have a huge
open source ecosystem and the computing ecosystem there are lots of three party libraries toolkits
such as csikit learn and you can use them to make your own application so learning python
is of vital importance in this period of time and the third step is algorithm if you want to
learn more about artificial intelligence and deep learning you need to know the basics of
convolutional neural networks recurrent neural net networks uh all kinds of neural networks
you need to learn the algorithms basic and the last and the most important step is a real project
which means get your hands dirty you need to learn through the real scenario project dealing with the
real scenario a problem so what's next for you you know you've been you've been making videos
um a lot during uh you know the the pandemic and um you've been learning a lot what's what's the
next thing that you want to focus on yeah i have a huge plan i will build my ai education ecosystem
in two years that's my dream this process is extremely enjoyable for us from the bottom
of our hearts that we are providing high quality education resources for a huge number of
future learners i love that i love that i love that you're helping people all over the world
yeah well thank you so much for talking with me and for doing all the great stuff that you do
this is so cool and and i i love um just seeing someone like you who's so driven and who's so
um willing to want to teach other people and i think that you've found a really good career and
and i think that this is something you're meant to do i'm so happy to have talked to you yeah
maybe two years later we can have another code story interview let's do it let's uh let's plan
to talk in two years because i can't wait to see what you um what you build then i'm so impressed
with everything you're doing uh i think it's so great two years from now we're definitely going to
talk again because i can't wait to see what more you've accomplished thank you so much thank you
you know just a couple of years ago Zihao was a civil engineering major and he didn't have
any interest in programming at all he saw satya nadella microsoft ceo speak when he was at the
university of pennsylvania and it opened up this whole new world for him and not only has he become
a really proficient programmer but he's actually gone on to teach you know thousands of people
from all over the world how to get started with artificial intelligence and machine learning and
python and open source and he's building out an entire curriculum to really empower people i think
that's really incredible and it just goes to show you that all of our code stories can be really
unique and can come from really different places and the fact that so many more people are going
to be learning because of him is really exciting we've got some resources down below where you can
check out how to get started if you're interested in learning both at docs.microsoft.com and
microsoft learn i also have some links to Zihao's github page because all the ai education work that
he was doing while an intern at microsoft research is just incredible and you know i can't wait to
see what he does next we promised that we would talk in two years so we will but i'm going to head
out now because it's a little bit late here but we'll see you next time thanks for tuning in you