I am the principal designer, implementer and maintainer of the ATS programming language system. Currently, I am working on ATS3/Xanadu, which is an implementation for ATS3, the third edition of ATS.
Professionally, I am currently a tenured associate professor in the Computer Science Department at Boston University (BU). I studied Mathematical Logic when I was an undergraduate student at Nanjing Univeristy, China. And I graduated from the Mathematics Department at Carnegie Mellon University in 1998 with a PhD degree in Pure and Applied Logic.
Before joining BU in October 2001, I was a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science (ECECS) at University of Cincinnati (UC).
Before joining UC in September 1999, I was a post-doctoral researcher at Pacific Software Research Centre (PacSoft) working on Formal Methods. And my supervisor was Prof. Jim Hook.
I joined PacSoft in August 1998 after finishing my PhD thesis titled Dependent Types in Practical Programming under the supervision of Prof. Frank Pfenning.
In 1995, I made a decision on pursuing my PhD study in the area of programming language design and implementation. I felt so lucky that Prof. Pfenning took me as one of his PhD students. At that time, I was working on the TPS (Theorem Proving System) project, focussing on applying the so-called mating method to automated higher-order theorem proving, and Prof. Peter Andrews, the inventor of the mating method, supervised my research.
In June 1992, I joined the Mathematics Department at Carnegie University as a starting PhD student. Prof. Peter Andrews hired me as a research assistant working on the TPS project, which was partly funded by NSF. While I majored in Mathematical Logic during my undergraduate years, I was always deeply attracted to writing programs. Prof. Andrews gave me an opportunity to work as a research programmer, which shaped my professional life and beyond. I forever thank him.