Product engineering · Applied AI · HCI

I build AI products from human need to a shipped system.

I'm Tianrun, also known as Roderick. I am a builder who works across user research, interaction design, and engineering to make products people can understand, steer, and trust.

Formerly SUSTech CSE, now joining CMU Silicon Valley for the MSSM program in August 2026.

See recent work
Portrait of Tianrun Qiu in front of a red railing
Shenzhen Silicon Valley

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Selected work

The work shaping how I build.

Recent products, work I've already shipped, and the research and deployments that shaped how I work.

Recent work

Two products · learning · sport

Language learning · Applied AIfrom 2026

Fluentide

Graded Chinese listening from real stories, with synced pinyin and translation. Web, iOS, and podcasts.

  • Shipped the learning loop so stories, audio, and vocabulary match each learner's HSK level.
  • Built the web and iOS product people use to listen, look up words, and come back the next day.

Amateur training · Agent systemsfrom 2025

ParroTao

An AI coach for amateur athletes. It reads their training data and writes plans they can understand and change. Chinese beta.

  • I own the agent: tools over activity data, a coach that proposes and revises plans, and the evaluation harness that checks those suggestions.
  • I also built most of the product the agent sits in: activity import, planning, teams, and the workspace.

Chinese betaAgent in a real training product

Beta (Chinese)

Selected work

Product engineering · Open source

Agent platform · Product engineeringFeb—May 2026

Atoms

Product Engineer · MetaGPT / DeepWisdom

Let people and external agents create, iterate, and deploy applications through an interface they can trust.

  • Built Atoms CLI 0→1 as a control plane for Atoms’ agent workflows: creating, inspecting, validating, and deploying apps.
  • Shaped the platform across product strategy, interaction design, and engineering, documented through 15 RFCs and PRDs.

15 RFCs & PRDs213 commits · 0→1 agent platform tooling

Experience product

Open source · Desktop product2019—Present

wnr

Creator

A cross-platform timer that makes breaks harder to skip while keeping its rules transparent.

  • Designed a work-and-rest product for Windows, macOS, and Linux around transparent rules and explicit user control.
  • Grew it over six years into a multilingual open-source product with an international contributor community.

1,000+GitHub stars · 6+ years

View project

Research & deployment

Cultural AI · Factory-floor AI

Creativity · Culture · AIACM CHI 2025

HarmonyCut

HCI Researcher · SUSTech

An AI-assisted paper-cutting tool that helps creators work with cultural symbolism, not shape alone.

  • Designed a system that connects visual form with cultural meaning, then evaluated it in a 16-person study.
  • Published the work as a full paper at ACM CHI 2025.

CHI '25Full paper · 29 citations

Read paper

Industrial AI · Deployed systemAug 2022—Oct 2023

Lika production system

AI Forward Deployed Engineer · Hangzhou Lika Rigging

A computer-vision defect-detection system that learned from normal production samples and ran in real time on low-cost edge hardware.

  • Co-led a deployed quality-inspection system, pairing normal-only anomaly detection with a dashboard shaped by factory-floor observation.
  • Optimized the vision pipeline for real-time inference on a ~$40 edge unit, contributing to a 10% quality improvement.

Granted patent+10% quality · $40 edge unit

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About

How I got here.

Education and the working principles behind what I build.

Education

Starting Aug 2026

Carnegie Mellon University, Silicon Valley

Master of Science in Software Management · Mountain View, CA

  • Incoming MSSM student focused on software engineering, product management, applied AI, and user experience.

Aug 2022—Jun 2026

Southern University of Science and Technology

B.Eng. in Computer Science and Technology · Shenzhen, China

  • Graduated with highest honors.
  • School Motto Scholarship · Top 0.2%.
  • M. Kuok Scholarship · Top 4%.

How I work

I tend to own the seams — between research and product decisions, interaction design and implementation, AI capability and user trust.

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Photography

The eye behind the products.