Sibo Zhu朱思博
Hey, glad you made it here. 👋
I'm Sibo (/ˈsiːboʊ/). These days I research alpha strategies at Innoam Asset Management in Shanghai. My previous identity: startup founder — co-founder & CTO of Cyber Partner AI, where our AI companion JiFeiFei sold 10,000+ units in its first month. Not a bad report card. Different battlefield now, same sport: shipping models that survive contact with reality.
Before that, years in the trenches of AI and robotics. At MIT's HAN Lab I worked with Prof. Song Han on making neural networks run fast and cheap — the kind of work that later became standard industry practice. As Perception Lead of MIT Driverless, I led a 20+ engineer team, pushed perception accuracy from 67% to 89%, and somewhere along the way talked Google, Waymo, and Oracle into putting their logos — and $200K+ in sponsorships — on a student-built race car. Good times.
The part I enjoy most is dragging research out of the lab and into the real world. I've personally worked both ends — papers at ICRA and IROS on one side, products with real revenue on the other — and everything in between, from CUDA kernels to go-to-market plans.
These days I'm happily heads-down on markets, but the door for good conversations never closes — tech deep-dives, startup war stories, research ideas, interesting projects. If you're building something cool, I'd genuinely like to hear about it.
Off the clock: snowboarding (AASI Level-II instructor — yes, I can legally teach you), photography, a fairly engineered approach to meal prep, and poking at the boundary between the digital and the physical world.
The track record below has the details. Want to talk? Contact's at the bottom — always happy to chat.
Track Record
- Quantitative research on systematic alpha strategies in China's liquid markets
- Bringing the ML engineering toolbox — feature pipelines, backtesting infrastructure, model deployment — to markets
- Co-founded the company and shipped our first product to 10,000+ unit sales in month one
- Led development of AI JiFeiFei hardware product for leading children's content platform "Kaishu Story"
- Delivered enterprise-grade Bumblebee robot solution for Volcano Engine flagship exhibition
- Built and managed cross-functional teams while securing strategic partnerships and funding
- Wound down the company in mid-2025, spent the gap retooling for quantitative finance
- Pioneered event-based perception research for autonomous driving emergency response
- Developed novel Vision Transformer methodologies for sparse event camera data processing
- Built a sensor calibration framework that cut calibration time from 3+ hours to under a second (10,000x)
- Created efficient LiDAR navigation system successfully deployed on full-scale autonomous vehicles
- Collaborated with Prof. Song Han on neural network optimization adopted across industry
- Led 20+ engineer team and brought in $200K+ in sponsorships from Google, Waymo, and Oracle
- Pushed perception mAP from 66.97% to 89.35%, enabling championship-winning performance
- Open-sourced frameworks adopted by 100+ Formula Student teams globally
Research Assistant
Brandeis University & Boston University
Massachusetts
- Developed motion blur detection system with 92% accuracy, open-sourced with 100+ GitHub stars
Education
Ph.D studies, Aerospace Science and Engineering (left to co-found Cyber Partner AI)
University of Toronto·2021 - 2023
M.S in Computer Science (AI/ML Specialization)
Brandeis University·2018 - 2020
B.A in Computer Science + Pure & Applied Mathematics (Double Major)
Boston University·2014 - 2018
Portfolio
Research, robots, and things that actually shipped
All of this is from my AI & robotics years — the optimization instincts, data pipelines, and ship-it discipline now go into markets.
AI JiFeiFei — 10K+ Units Sold in Month One
Our first product at Cyber Partner AI: an interactive AI companion for 'Kaishu Story', China's biggest children's content platform. Sold 10,000+ units in the first month and passed 100,000 within six months. The fun part was squeezing 0.9-second response latency out of an ESP32-S3 — custom model compression plus hardware-AI co-design — and giving it long-term memory so it actually remembers the kid it talks to.
Team: Sibo Zhu, Cyber Partner AI Team
April 2025
Bumblebee Interactive Robot - Enterprise AI Solution
A 2-meter humanoid robot for Volcano Engine's flagship exhibition hall, built end-to-end on the Agibot A2 platform with our own conversational AI stack. Speaks two languages, stays in character, and survives the harshest test environment in robotics — the general public, 24/7. Vision, voice, and NLP stitched into one coherent personality, delivered on an exhibition deadline (the kind that doesn't move).
Team: Sibo Zhu, Cyber Partner AI Team
December 2024
SemAlign: Sensor Calibration in Under a Second
Co-first-authored calibration framework (IROS 2021), born from the chore everyone on the race team quietly hated: self-supervised semantic alignment — no manual labels — that cut camera-LiDAR calibration from 3+ hours to under one second, a 10,000x speedup. The task the whole AV industry treated as a necessary evil became a non-event.
Authors: Zhijian Liu, Haotian Tang, Sibo Zhu, Song Han
October 2021
MIT Driverless: Perception Lead
Ran the perception team and the sponsorship pitch in parallel: $200K+ from Google, Waymo, and Oracle on one side, YOLOv3 mAP from 66.97% to 89.35% on the other. The frameworks we open-sourced are now used by 100+ Formula Student teams around the world.
Authors: Sibo Zhu, MIT Driverless Team
August 2021
LiDAR End-to-End Navigation (ICRA 2021)
End-to-end LiDAR navigation framework co-authored with Daniela Rus and Song Han (ICRA 2021). Sparse convolution optimization plus hardware-aware architecture design, demonstrated on a full-scale autonomous vehicle — not a simulator, the real thing. From raw point cloud to steering command in one pipeline.
Authors: Zhijian Liu, Alexander Amini, Sibo Zhu, Sertac Karaman, Song Han, Daniela Rus
May 2021
PatchNet: Ultra-Compact CNN for Edge Computing
Ultra-compact CNN co-authored with Huizi Mao (NVIDIA Edge AI Lead), Bill Dally (NVIDIA Chief Scientist), and Song Han (MIT): exploiting temporal redundancy in video to get down to 58M FLOPs — 5x fewer, 4.3x faster on edge devices, same accuracy. Open-sourced, and the ideas have quietly made their way across the industry.
Authors: Huizi Mao, Sibo Zhu, Song Han, William J Dally
March 2021
High-Speed Autonomous Racing Perception System
Co-authored IROS 2020 paper on practical computer vision for autonomous racing: a deeply optimized YOLOv3, custom pose estimation, and sub-microsecond camera synchronization, squeezed into a 200ms full-stack latency perception system. The open-sourced framework is used by Formula Student teams worldwide.
Authors: Kieran Strobel, Sibo Zhu, Raphael Chang, Skanda Koppula
July 2020
Earlier Work
Faster LiDAR: Real-Time Point Cloud Processing Framework
November 2020
Attention-based transformer framework for predicting missing LiDAR frames in real-time autonomous driving. 40% throughput improvement with detection accuracy (mAP) unchanged.
PointPainting: Sensor Fusion Framework Implementation
August 2020
Implemented nuTonomy's camera-LiDAR fusion model PointPainting, then used it as the evaluation testbed for our 3D point-cloud prediction and sensor calibration research.
Grad-CAM: CNN Interpretability Framework
March 2019
Implemented Grad-CAM to visualize CNN decision-making, used for debugging the race car's object detection — in safety-critical settings, models need to be explainable.
Motion Blur Detection: CNN-Based Computer Vision
May 2018
CNN for motion blur detection in high-speed camera systems, 92% accuracy. Open-sourced it and picked up 100+ GitHub stars — my first taste of shipping something strangers actually use.
Get In Touch!
The inbox is open — bring something interesting
Location
Shanghai, China
"Knowledge only comes from empirical observation, everything else is just speculation." - Devon Eriksen