David Wu
Assistant Professor at The University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDavid Wu is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin with 11 years of experience spanning applied cryptography, computer security, and AI-driven systems. He completed his BS, MS, and PhD at Stanford and previously held faculty and research positions at the University of Virginia and Stanford, where he worked on both theoretical cryptography and large-scale deep learning infrastructure. His research blends rigorous cryptographic theory with practical security engineering, informed by internships at Microsoft Research and industry experience improving backend reliability at Facebook and Coursera. An active coder, he has contributed backend optimizations to the popular open-source Go engine KataGo, demonstrating a knack for performance tuning and integrating core libraries. Colleagues describe him as someone who moves fluidly between formal proofs and production code, bringing both academic depth and pragmatic implementation skills to security problems. Based in Austin, he combines strong publication credentials with hands-on systems work that surfaces in both research prototypes and open-source contributions.
11 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science (AI Specialization), Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science (AI Specialization) at Stanford University
English, Chinese
Github Skills (15)
opencl10
go10
game-dev9
optimization9
game-development9
game-engine9
cprogramming-language9
optimisation9
numerical-optimization9
c-language9
algorithm9
code-optimization9
algorithms9
pattern-recognition8
tensorrt8
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
lightvector/KataGo
Oct 2018 - Jan 2023
GTP engine and self-play learning in Go
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:51 releases, 53 reviews, 2570 commits in 4 years 4 months
Contributions summary:David contributed to the development and refinement of the KataGo engine, a GTP (Go Text Protocol) engine and self-play learning tool. Their contributions included implementing new features for pattern bonuses and the "avoid repeated pattern" functionality, documented through code changes and commit messages. They also worked on integrating core library updates, specifically the fileutils and the hgemm library, to enhance the engine's performance and efficiency, suggesting a focus on code optimization.
go
lightvector/goscorer
Jan 2024 - Apr 2025
Territory scoring in Go with seki detection
Contributions:1 release, 1 PR, 10 pushes in 1 year 3 months
go
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.