
hey, i'm thomas! i study information systems & math at carnegie mellon, and this is my professional homepage.
i write code, poetry, and plans (ask me about my plans).
if you’d prefer to read more in-depth about me and my work, please keep scrolling down.
About
born and raised in vancouver, canada, i now live in pittsburgh for most of the year pursuing my undergraduate degree.
my hard skills are in computer engineering (software, hardware, embedded, protocols/networks) and finance (capital markets, commodities, valuation & business analysis, international trade & logistics), with a working background in design and marketing.
most recently, i spent a summer in shenzhen at a private fund doing quantitative research on chinese commodity futures markets. lately, i've gotten very into prediction markets and ai/ml research, which is where most of my free time goes now.
i also currently run voxpop! @ cmu, a personal research project testing if students can outperform the average prediction market participant at the subject they study.
outside of work i golf, swim, ski, play tennis and pool, lift, and cycle. i'm also very into fashion and poetry.
below, a non-exhaustive list of tools i'm good at:
python, c, c++, javascript, typescript, java, sql, bash (i pick up other languages fast)
avr and esp microcontrollers, mos 6502, minecraft redstone & command block, autodesk eagle, fusion360
reactjs, nextjs, django, fastapi, mongodb, rest apis, tailwind, html, css
photoshop, indesign, premiere pro, ableton live, blender
i’ve been looking into agentic coding tools and workflows, but most of what i do is signals research and low-level, correctness-critical code, so i still do the bulk of it by hand. i’m curious where these tools fit in once they’re good enough to trust with the parts that can’t be wrong.
Work
Mingyue Asset Management
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quantitative research intern
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summer 2026 · shenzhen
discovered and validated mid-frequency signals on chinese futures markets
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cleaned raw data and backtested predictive power against forward returns
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moved validated research into firm production signal library w/ the trading-infrastructure team
Luxmore Realty
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software engineering intern
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summer 2025 · vancouver
developed legally compliant (fintrac) internal software to keep track of paper bank drafts
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also worked on internal software to keep track of mls data and support brokerage operations
VentureLift Business Program
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co-founder & chief growth officer
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2024–2026 · vancouver
created & grew a weeklong business program for high school students (acquired by vancouver's st. george’s school foundation in 2025)
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designed case studies mentored & judged by executives of the companies studied; recruited managing directors from jp morgan, goldman sachs, apollo, and cpp investments as advisors
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led brand, positioning, outreach, and web presence (10,000+ visits/year); raised ~$50k/year in donations
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now admits 75 students/year across the main program & a new youth program; piloted the model for 20+ new programs across british columbia also by the st. george's school foundation
CAHSMUN
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deputy secretary-general & cto
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2023–2026 · vancouver
led operations and technology for a 1,000+ attendee model un conference
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built live transcription software tuned to the conference’s context to improve accessibility
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analyzed seven years of attendee data to direct outreach and financial aid toward underrepresented communities
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built sponsorship microsites that secured ~$10k in funding
Helping Hearts Youth Foundation
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director of information technology
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2023–2025 · vancouver
led seven developers to ship volunteer management software unifying records across 50+ schools and 1.5k+ volunteers provincewide
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designed payment systems for donations and transactions across five community events, including the annual vancouver bloom spring market (40 small businesses)
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ran event tech for dozens of events across vancouver partnered with the helping hearts youth foundation, from indie concerts to political debates
Projects
The Mycelium Network
a decentralized content provenance protocol. combines a "proof-of-trust" mechanism based on the pagerank algorithm with traditional hashing methods to track trust across media types. currently being adapted by a student research group @ ucla working on the protocol's open problems. (contact for original whitepaper)
AI Chatbot Interventions for Behaviour Change
a nih-funded study on how empathetic chatbots can meaningfully help people stuck in addictive cycles. part of the broader research done by the charm lab @ ucsb; second author; accepted to the wsca conference. (contact for pdf)
a full turing-complete 8-bit cpu designed from scratch out of discrete 74ls-series logic gate chips. i feature this as it is still one of my favourite projects. wrote a bootloader for it too, and ended up recreating part of it in minecraft w/ redstone.
explains why your skin is the way it is: scores your face by dryness, breakouts, and texture via daily scans, then attributes it to air quality, product ingredients, health, and movement data via distributed-lag regression with shap.
& the Smaller Things
my smaller projects, from 2019 to 2023 during my early middle & high school days which i now keep public to let you see how i have evolved:
live transcription software for a 1,000+ person conference (no link avaliable)
discord bots for online communities (no link avaliable)
this plus modding minecraft is how i got my start into programming during the covid-19 lockdowns
Awards
1st place, drw trading group × carnegie mellon trading competition
2026
2nd place, xdhacks, the largest high school hackathon in western canada (technical lead)
2026
global top 10 of 6,000+ teams, wharton global high school investment competition (team leader)
2023
top 15 of 1,000+ youth poets nationwide, poetry in voice, canada council for the arts
2025
top 1 schoolwide, malcolm campbell memorial scholarship for excellence in creative writing, st. george's school
2026
Contact
if something here is interesting to you, i’d love to hear about it. (and yes, ask me about my plans)
thomasdli [at] cmu [dot] edu · linkedin.com/in/thomasdli · github.com/thomasdli

