I grew up as a math nerd in Hanoi, Vietnam, claiming a gold medal at IMO 1986. As a CS major in Hungary, I wandered around the Eastern Bloc as the Berlin wall fell. Moving further west to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I got a PhD in AI, publishing a few papers. After a stint at Honeywell Labs, I moved even further west to Seattle, joining Bing in its formative years. In 2014 I joined the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) to create Semantic Scholar. Currently I am advising startups on real-world AI as part of the institute's incubator program.