The World From Afar: An Engineer’s Perspective by Allison Huang
Most think of TikTok as a product of quarantine — filled with dances, recipes, questionable stock tips, juvenile acting performances, and the endless thoughts of a restless population trapped in a pandemic-ridden world. My dad, a Taiwanese-born immigrant turned engineer, however, has had it on his phone before it was any of that, since September of 2018. Currently working in Nvidia’s machine learning department, Andrew Huang embodies the pragmatism and knack for optimization of your typical engineer, but he’s remarkably focused on the big picture. The world he sees isn’t limited to the next fifty years, or even Earth for that matter — he’s thinking in the thousands of years about the world we have yet to discover. Not only that, he’s always thinking about tomorrow’s world, grabbing on to the next big thing before it’s big, be it blockchain, reusable rockets, or even TikTok. It’s this future-oriented, long term outlook that reveals a compassion for the lives of others and a desire to better them that’s often hidden by a stoic disposition and a tendency to think too much. While most find their attention both occupied and bounded by the small sliver
A CARICATURE OF HUANG, DRAWN IN 2006
of the world right in front of them, Huang is consciously working in the present on what he knows will be a big part of the future, and he’s always watching what others around him, particularly up and coming startups, are developing. He almost dove into the startup world himself after graduating high school, his flagship product being a 3D plotting program that he had
written from scratch over the course of three to six months. Allowing the user to specify a function of z in terms of x and y, the program would graph the output, even offering a “fast mode” in which just a wire mesh model was rendered. “And then using the arrow keys, you can rotate along two different axes, you can zoom in and out, in the sense that you can increase the perspective or decrease
it,” he said. While he floated the idea of skipping college to make something out of this program, he knew he needed something more to make it a viable entrepreneurial pursuit. “I ended up taking the more conservative route — went to college instead.” In hindsight, he looks back on this project fondly, finding value in the experience of putting it together from scratch and figuring out all of the math and logic on his own. The son of an ambassador, Huang was born in Taiwan but lived in Malaysia briefly before immigrating to the US in 1977. Taking an interest in computers, he went through an Apple II and an IBM PCjr before heading to University of California, Los Angeles to study electrical engineering. After receiving a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in computer engineering, he went on to work for Intel, AMD, and various startups doing chip design. In 2018, he took a job as a machine learning performance analyst at Nvidia where he studies how commonly used machine learning algorithms perform on Nvidia’s GPUs, with the goal of minimizing the difference between
theoretical and actual performance. Theoretical performance is based on the ability of the GPU (how many math operations it can run per second) and the nature of the algorithm (how many math operations it takes to run). “So you can figure out that in theory, this network should be able to run in as little as so many microseconds or milliseconds. But in reality, it runs at two times that, so then you have to try to figure out why we have this gap and if it’s fixable,” he explained. For instance, a natural language processing model known as BERT is commonly used by companies like Google to process search requests or answer questions. “Our goal is to have the fastest BERT that’s available, compared to, say, BERT running on CPUs or specialized accelerators,” Huang said. While his day to day work remains within the confines of his computer, he remains most excited about what’s beyond: space. The use of reusable rockets to him is both an amazing technological feat as well as an innovation that enables future exploration to a degree that was previously not feasible by bringing down the cost of subsequent missions. Indeed, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 Block 5 was designed with reusability
in mind and was predicted to easily reduce costs by up to 30 percent compared to manufacturing a new rocket for every launch. Additionally, he’s closely following developments of mining on the moon, which he sees as a stepping stone to building more complex infrastructure off of Earth by allowing us to source materials without having to transport them through space. He admits his outlook is long term but points out that it’s really a matter of time — “space exploration is inevitable because if you take physics and you study stars, you know that the sun will burn out, so there’s nowhere else to go.” It still sounds almost foolish to worry about such a problem, but the reality is that someone has to. In the more immediate future, Huang is focused on utilizing the scope of technology to improve lives. “Technology is important because it raises the standard of living for everybody on Earth. It allows people to have better and better lives. And everybody is affected by technology. So it’s also very important for us to know where technology is today and where it’s going tomorrow. But in the end, it’s about making the lives of people better.”
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Apple II The Power to Be Your Best
Clear the kitchen table. Bring in the color T.V. Plug in your new Apple II, and connect any standard cassette recorder/player. Now you’re ready for an evening of discovery in the new world of personal computers. (Dec 1977 ad)
Allison Huang is a junior at Mountain View High School and a design student at Freestyle Academy.