For me, cooking is practical. That's the core of an engineer. Engineers are very practical designers and creative people. Every single thing I create has to have a purpose.
Engineers are very logical and everything has to be tested so when we fail, we'll know why and how to improve things.
Engineers don't have that sixth sense where we can just toss in things here and there like many chefs.
China cannot pull in the best and brightest from all over the world. It's an ethnically defined nation, the opposite of an immigrant nation. You don't see a lot of American engineers trying to be Chinese citizens.
When we automated away the elevator operator function, who knew that all the descendants of those operators would become social media marketers, machine learning engineers, and all these other jobs that we didn't even have a language to describe back then.
One of the things that Baidu did well early on was to create an internal platform for deep learning. What that did was enable engineers all across the company, including people who were not AI researchers, to leverage deep learning in all sorts of creative ways - applications that an AI researcher like me never would have thought of.
I was very lucky because hanging out at a golf course was much better than being on the streets. Golf taught me a great deal. I grew up surrounded by people who were professionals - lawyers, doctors, engineers. Around them, I learned how to behave, speak, eat, dress. I had nothing at home. The club was my home.
Many of the engineers I interviewed worked on reverse-engineering technology. It's a hallmark of Area 51.
People say I play real loud. I don't, actually. I'm recorded loud and a lot of that is because we have good engineers. Mick knows what a good drum sound is as well, so that's part of the illusion really. I can't play loud.
We need Hollywood to make movies and television shows about sexy female engineers.
