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Alumni Meetings - Ethan NING

During the visit to the USA, we have two memorable meetings with alumni from CUHK for learning their valuable experience as entrepreneurs.

Meet Justine, a former Facebook employee. After leaving the company, this man launched two startups that have successful exit purchased by FaceBook in the end.

Chatting with other alumni.

Western Digital Corporation (abbreviated WDC, commonly known as Western Digital and abbreviated WD) is an American computer hard disk drive manufacturer and data storage company. It designs, manufactures and sells data technology products, including storage devices, data center systems and cloud storage services.

On May 20th afternoon, we met Dr. Liu at the front door of the Western Digital. Dr. Liu is currently at the Researching and Developing department working on computer vision.

Although Dr. Liu cannot bring us into the company due to the regulation, we had a...

Intuitive Surgical Inc. is an American corporation that develops, manufactures and markets robotic products designed to improve clinical outcomes of patients through minimally invasive surgery, most notably with the da Vinci Surgical System.

What is da Vinci Surgical System? It is designed to facilitate complex surgery using a minimally invasive approach, and is controlled by a surgeon from a console. The system is commonly used for prostatectomies, and increasingly for cardiac valve repair and gynecologic surgical procedures. The da Vinci System is called "da Vinci" in part because Leonardo da Vinci's "study of human anatomy eventually led to the design of the first known robot in...

For the purpose of creating “quality communications”, Qualcomm Incorporated is an American multinational semiconductor and telecommunications equipment company that designs and markets wireless telecommunications products and services. As one of the wholly-owned subsidiaries by Qualcomm Incorporated, the company we visited, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. (QTI), operates nearly all of Qualcomm's R&D activities.

The host Dr. Xu got his Bachelor's Degree in Engineering in Tsinghua University in 2013 and his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in 2018. Focusing on the fingerprint sensor, he has been working in Qualcomm Technologies Inc. as a...

We had the opportunity to visit Plug and Play Tech Center on Friday, the 17th of May for one of their Friday pitch sessions. Plug and Play Tech Center is an early stage investor and corporate innovation platform specializing in the development of early-to-growth stage technology startups. They present themselves as a complete global startup ecosystem.

Plug and Play extends worldwide through established programs in Europe, South America, and South-East Asia. With over 200 corporate and investor partners, Plug and Play has helped over 3000 startups. Their portfolio has raised over $3.5 billion in funding with over 100 successful exits to date. Famous companies such as Google, Dropbox, LendingClub, and PayPal are all invested by Plug and Play.

We were initially led by an intern called Afifa at Plug and Play who briefed us...

Unless you know someone or have a meeting on Facebook, it’s basically no way a visitor goes inside the HQ of Facebook. We are lucky to have Jimmy and Yuan Yuan to arrange this company visit for our team. A big round of applause to them!

I know that these silicon valley companies are crazily huge with beautiful interior design. Even though I have mentally prepared to visit these companies. When I was actually staying in the place, my mind still gets blown. However, my first impression of Facebook is not about it’s interior but how crowded it is. So many people were walking around the office and I felt like I was stuck in a shopping mall since there are coffee shops and snack bars midway through the meeting room. Since I used to work in the tech department of a bank so that’s basically the complete opposite of a bank...

LinkedIn ( https://www.linkedin.com/ ) is a business and employment-oriented service that operates via websites and mobile apps. Founded on December 28, 2002, and launched on May 5, 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking, including employers posting jobs and job seekers posting their CVs. As of March 2019, LinkedIn had 610 million registered members in 200 countries.

Our host, Dr. Gao Yan is a CUHK alumnus of IE department graduated in 2006, who is now serving as the senior software engineer in LinkedIn in the data segments. Before the sharing, we were shown around the campus of LinkedIn, and we are truly amazed by the high welfare standard of it. Dr. Yan proudly said that...