There is a treasure chest of economic insights that resides within trademark application data. At Huski AI, we’re excited to leverage our unparalleled expertise in AI and Big Data to work on such knowledge discovery and share it with the community.
Recently, we shared the Trending Topics in Trademark Applications since Covid, the Trademark Processing Time Analysis, the Image vs Text Trademark Application Analysis, and many more.
Now it is our great honor to introduce the man behind Huski AI’s first insight initiative.
Prof. Jiawei Zhang is visiting us for the summer to work on some of our real-world artificial intelligence (AI) and data science (DS) problems by proposing novel machine learning algorithms. More specifically, his code unveils the insights.
Jiawei is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Davis. He founded the IFM Lab in 2017, and has been working as the director since then. His research focus has been on graph neural networks, graph mining, recommender systems, natural language processing, social networks mining and neuroscience, and has published papers in top conferences and journals, including AAAI, IJCAI, KDD, WWW, ICDE, SIGIR, EMNLP.
During his summer visit at Huski AI, we had the chance to discuss tons of interesting ideas and research initiatives. He also helped us discover the first batch of insights within the trademark application data (a lot of computing power went in there too).
To spark further collaborations between Huski and academia, we let Jiawei weigh in on a few related topics. Below is our conversation with him.
The “basic” questions:
Q: Tell us about yourself. Who are you, what do you do, what’s your background?
A: Currently, I’m an assistant professor of the computer science department at UC Davis. I obtained my PhD degree on Computer Science from University of Illinois at Chicago in 2017, and have been working at the academia since then.
Q: What are your specialties?
A: I have a special interest in analyzing data to discovery some hidden patterns and insights. My research is focused on AI, data mining and machine learning. So, my research and work is closely related to data and AI models.
Q: How would you describe what you do to your peers?
A: A researcher, an educator, and a writer.
Q: How would you describe what you do to a grandparent?
A: A teacher to assign students homework…
Q: Do you have any background in intellectual property?
A: Not really, the currently AI community loves to open-source and want to share their works freely to the community to push the technology to develop faster. But I’m interested in learning more about IP and related protection laws, so I can project my IP with commercial values in the future.
Q: What made you interested in joining us for the summer?
A: Two reasons. First, the CTO Guan of Huski.ai is my previous colleague, I know he is working on a startup for about two years. I’m very interested in how startup company runs and want to learn more about how young entrepreneurs manage their first startup.
Second, I’m also interested in the data available at Huski.ai. I heard from Guan that they have millions of trademark data, and there will be lots of opportunities to utilize such large-scale data to mining useful insights with high impacts.
So, I applied to have a short-term of visit at Huski to see if I can help with any data related projects.
Q: What’s been your favorite part about working with us so far?
A: I really enjoy the tech-driven working environment at Huski.ai, people here are very friendly and they are really into to utilizing AI technology to change the world. I feel it is very different from universities, at Huski.ai we are using the technology to do things with high impacts, and we can also see the results and changes to the world more directly.
Q: Why do you think IP is important?
A: According to my understanding, IP protection and innovation are strongly related. People and company will create new innovations, new technology and new products, if their IP will be protected by the law. Without IP protection, we probably will not have iPhone, no Facebook, no Tesla, etc.
Q: Why what’s interesting about Huski data?
A: The data at Huski actually can reveal many interest insights about the commercial trends. According to the data, we can observe the changing of trademark applications in recent years, also we can see some new technology and products created in recent years.
Q: What’s the exciting insights you discovered so far?
A: For instance, according to our current analysis, we observe that in the recent 3 years, the application of trademarks about cryptocoin and NFT (non-fungible token) increases a lot, we also observe that since Facebook is renamed to Metaverse, lots of trademark applications on virtual reality and augmented reality appears. Of course, we also see lots of companies are applying trademarks on masks due to the Covid-19 issues.
Q: How should Huski collaborate better with academia?
A: For the collaboration, I think Huski can collaborate with universities to create some programs to allow college students to use the resources and data at Huski to work on their projects. The data at Huski is very valuable and will also help the students gain better understandings about IP, trademarks, and also analyze the trends and insights.
Also probably Huski.ai can also try to create some research challenges to call for the proposals, submissions and solutions from the academia for the open problems to be addressed at Huski.
Of course, Huski can also try to hire the top talents of the challenges as the interns to get them involved into the projects at Huski.ai.
The “fun” questions:
We won’t do all of these in the real interview, just the most fun ones. Answer whichever of these you’d like, or feel free to share something else that’s more interesting.
Q: What did you want to be when you grew up?
A: Originally, I planned to be an entrepreneur to create my own company that can change the world, just like Huski.ai. I still have that dream right now and probably will try to work it out.
Q: If you couldn’t work in computer science anymore, what would you do?
A: I probably will get a new degree about movie production to be a director, and try to make a movie that can reflect our current world, like Nomadland a few years ago…
Q: If you suddenly won $10 million, what would you do?
A: Probably, first buy a house at the bay area, then take a long-break to have some trips to places I cannot go. And also spend the rest on either my own startup or on my first movie.
Q: Describe your dream vacation:
A: At a deserted island, with my family, no cell-phones or computers, just reading, cooking and enjoying the peaceful time together.
Q: What’s something most people wouldn’t guess about you?
A: I used to have long-hair for more than two years since the covid, now I have my hair cut and donated to the wigs for kids.
Q: What’s your go-to coffee shop order?
A: I know may people like to drive coffee, actually I’m more like a tea lover. I used to drink tea all day long, but now my parents cannot mail new teas to me anymore due to the covid issues.
Q: Would you ever want to be famous?
A: Sometimes, sometimes I really want to promote my works to the people or get more resources to work on something out, I hope I’m famous so I can get it done easily.
But for most of the time, I prefer enjoy the peaceful lives and so I can focus more on thinking deeper questions instead.
Q: Do you have any cool hobbies or talents?
A: I really like to design and make robots at my spare time, and try to make it work. I also spend lots of time to watch different kinds of movies and reading lots of novel books about history and culture, it is lots of fun.
Q: Favorite place you ever lived?
A: Probably Shanghai and Chicago, very different places with different weather and culture. I like the city life, it is much fun for young people and it is also very convenient to get everything I may need.
Q: Do you have any pets?
A: I used to have two cats when I was young, but no I have no pets since I travel a lot and it is very hard to take care of them. In the future, I probably plan to have two cats again after I finally decide to settle down at a place.
You can also watch the full interview for Jiawei conducted by our very own Tessa Molnar in this video (and learn more fun facts about Jiawei)