Tianrun Qiu

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 what I'm building
Portrait of Tianrun Qiu in front of a red railing
Shenzhen Silicon Valley

01

Selected work

The work shaping how I build.

What I'm building now, what I've already shipped, and the research and deployments that shaped how I work.

Building now

Two products · learning · sport

Language learning · Applied AIJun 2026—Present

Fluentide

Founding Engineer

Turn timely, authentic content into level-appropriate listening, vocabulary, and practice.

  • Shaped the learning loop so stories, audio, and vocabulary adapt to each learner's level.
  • Own the web and mobile product end to end, from research and interaction decisions to engineering and growth.

700+Learners

Experience product

Amateur training · AI systemsSep 2025—Present

ParroTao Training

Full-stack & AI systems engineer

Practical coaching for amateur athletes — plans they can understand and adjust.

  • Built most of the athlete-facing product: activity import, planning, teams, and the AI workspace.
  • Created an AI coach grounded in training data, extending the backend and evaluation harness across repositories.

215Commits · frontend · backend · agent

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, independent work & deployment

Cultural AI · Digital wellbeing · 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 · 16-person study

Read paper

Digital wellbeing · Applied AINov 2025—Present

SeeNot

Creator · AI, product, engineering

A phone that can tell whether the current screen still matches what you came to do.

  • Users state a session goal; a vision-language model reads the screen and checks whether it still serves that intent.
  • Built the Android app, services, and site end to end, with graduated interventions and local-first, bring-your-own-key privacy.

End-to-endAI · Android · service · open source

View project

Industrial AI · Deployed systemAug 2022—Oct 2023

Lika production system

Digital Transformation 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

02

About

How I got here.

Education, working principles, and life outside work.

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.

Outside work