Adrian Wan

I was born in Hong Kong and lived there for 18 years. I attended the Chinese International School, graduating with a bilingual diploma from the International Baccalaureate. I learned to love passionate food, healthy habits, and pictures of jumping people.

I graduated from Swarthmore College in June 2015, double majoring in Physics and Computer Science. After spending the summer backpacking — one month in Western Europe, one in Japan, and a couple of days back home in Hong Kong to recuperate — I moved out to the Bay Area to work at Nest, where I was offered a full-time position on the heels of a fruitful internship.

Currently in my fourth month as a full-time adult, I work on the Algorithms team for the Nest Learning Thermostat . We're responsible for designing, prototyping, and iterating on the features that allow our devices to provide a delightful and magical user experience. For instance, our team is responsible for the machine learning algorithms that allow us to learn a user's preferences just from how they interact with the device, so that we can save them energy and money while keeping them comfortable. Working at a Google-backed company with startup-esque autonomy and agility is a fantastic blend of the two worlds.

I love learning that many things in nature can be described and explained with mathematics, and I have a passion for developing flexible, extensible, useful tools. I hope to explore, understand, and hopefully solve real-world problems using math, code, and a good-natured desire to learn a little more about everything. I'd also like to help make the world run on fusion energy, and to develop an AI that passes the (unrestricted) Turing Test and sasses harder than a J.A.R.V.I.S.-GLaDOS tag team, but I'm trying to take things slowly.

When I'm not working, I play volleyball, practice aikido, and enjoy the sun; I cook less than I eat, I start more books than I finish, and I look for music that I can play on repeat. I like breakfasts, memorable poems, and brightly-lit tables big enough to spread all my thoughts on.