Researching AI by day,
making music by night.
I'm Nick Z. Cai — an AI researcher & builder working across NLP, LLM safety and agentic systems, with a parallel life in music production and multimedia arts. Interested in trustworthy LLMs, agentic AI for real-world markets, and everything where AI meets sound.
Selected Work
Research, engineering and creative projects — from LLM safety benchmarks to agentic trading infrastructure to original songs.
MeantByMe
A consent-first communication agent for people with fragmented or impaired speech. ASR, contextual memory and LLMs propose candidate expressions — but nothing is spoken without explicit confirmation. "AI proposes; the patient decides."
Ustnlp16 at SemEval-2025 Task 9
Improving NLP model performance through imbalance handling and focal loss for food-hazard detection. Published in the Proceedings of SemEval-2025 (ACL Workshop).
LLM Persuasion Defense
Independent research at HKUST CSE (advised by Prof. Yangqiu Song): a reproducible multi-turn persuasion benchmark with a stateful attacker and stateless target, plus prompt defenses and attention-head gating.
Phenotype-to-Diagnosis with GNNs
Built at CSIC (Madrid): clinical notes standardized to HPO/Phenopackets, IC-IDF weighting and GNN disease embeddings to rank OMIM diagnoses, with a reproducible evaluation framework.
Agentic Market Infrastructure
Agentic AI systems for financial markets — an autonomous quantitative research agent, an agent-facing financial action layer, and a Rust-based Polymarket CLOB arbitrage bot.
Celestial Music Generation
At HKGAI: a generative model and app that composes music from traditional Chinese celestial concepts, plus a deployed web service for the MultiTalk multi-person video generation project.
Experience
Industry and research roles across Hong Kong, Spain, Japan and mainland China.
Student Researcher
Led Exploring Risks of Misleading Information from Chat Assistants and Countermeasures (advised by Prof. Yangqiu Song): multi-turn persuasion & defense evaluation with turn/order ablations, cross-backend cost & latency telemetry, prompt defenses and attention-head gating.
Research Intern
Built and evaluated a phenotype-to-diagnosis pipeline using HPO/Phenopackets, IC–IDF and GNN embeddings to rank OMIM diseases, with automated sweeps, ROC-AUC, Recall@k and ablation analysis. Supervised by Dr. Monica Chagoyen.
Research Assistant
Built a generative AI model composing music from traditional Chinese celestial concepts; deployed the MultiTalk multi-person video generation service end-to-end — model inference, backend APIs and a frontend UI for job submission and monitoring.
Student Researcher
Researched acoustic wave-field estimation using physics-informed machine learning, incorporating PDE constraints to improve physical consistency. Implemented and trained PINNs and Fourier Neural Operators to reconstruct room-acoustic and spatial wave fields from sparse measurements.
Student Researcher
Led Creative Sound and Video Design (advised by Prof. Andrew Horner): created audio and video mashups, remixed music videos and original multimedia works combining creative production with computational methods, and developed an Auto Music Mashup System on music data using deep learning.
Programmer Intern
Designed musical and lexical Unity mini-games for language-learning research and built a complete music intervention system.
Research Intern
Researched error-correcting codes (Hamming & Reed–Solomon) in MATLAB with Prof. Hajime Matsui at the Information Communication Engineering Laboratory.
Business Manager Intern
Analyzed China Mobile's commodity purchases with Python and predicted enterprise purchase preferences via ML; designed algorithms to speed up procurement data processing across 27,000 goods.
Software Development Intern
Built computer-vision models detecting traffic violations at 95% accuracy; analyzed monitoring-system traffic data with SQL & Python to ease congestion in Hefei.
Education
MSc in Big Data Technology
GPA 3.99/4.3. Entrance, Excellent Student & Goertek Academic Excellence Scholarships. Independent projects in creative sound & video design and LLM safety.
BSc in Internet & Multimedia Technologies, Minor in Applied Mathematics
Dean's Honours List & Best Semester GPA Award (2021/22). Final year project: video scene analysis with key-feature emission using deep learning.
Honors & Beyond the Lab
🏆 Honors & Awards
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Runner-UpAdventureX Hackathon 2026 · Reverse Track, Hangzhou2026
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Three Sponsor Track AwardsAdventureX Hackathon 2026 · Qoder, Superun.ai & viaim/iFLYTEK2026
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Goertek Academic Excellence ScholarshipHKUST2025–26
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Excellent Student ScholarshipHKUST2024–25
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Entrance ScholarshipHKUST2024–25
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Special Recognition & Merit AwardsThe Hong Kong Polytechnic University2023–24
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Runner-UpW3 Algorand Hackathon 2023 · University of Belgrade & University of Florida2023
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Best Semester GPA AwardThe Hong Kong Polytechnic University2021–22
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Dean's Honours ListThe Hong Kong Polytechnic University2021–22
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Dr. Y.K. Ching Memorial ScholarshipThe Hong Kong Polytechnic University2021–22
🎭 Activities & Leadership
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Member · The University Choir, HKUSTBass 1, representing the university in performances2024–26
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Young Future Energy Leader (2024 Cohort)Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi — global debates on sustainable energy2023–25
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Global Student Ambassador · PolyU GSAPCross-cultural exchange and student affairs2022–23
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Music Director · PolyU Hall ChoirOrganized music workshops and led choir performance coaching2021–22
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Curriculum Designer & Lecturer · HeartFire EducationDesigned and taught a remote curriculum for 3 primary schools in Taiwan2021–22
📜 Certifications
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Mental Health First Aid Standard CourseMental Health Association of Hong Kong2024
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The Art of Music ProductionBerklee College of Music (Coursera)2021
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Fundamentals of Music TheoryUniversity of Edinburgh (Coursera)2020
Skills
AI / Data
Engineering
Creative
Languages
Let's build something.
Open to research collaborations, engineering roles and creative projects — or just say hi.