- Joined
- Not public
- How they joined
- Directly
- Before Cognition
- NYU Courant Institute of Mathematical SciencesAssistant Professor of Computer Science
- Status
- Current
- Credited in Research on Cognition's SWE-1.7 launch (2026-07-08), the RL-post-trained coding model built on a Kimi K2.7 base and trained inside the Devin harness; author list reads '... Fermi Ma, Allen Liu, Yang Liu, Sampriti Panda, Jacob Teo, Ray Wang, Gary Chang, Steven Cao, Silas Alberti'.Jul 8, 2026
- His public notes on OpenAI's Unitary Synthesis Problem solution state: 'All of the following text was written by me, with extensive help from Devin, an AI agent that had access to a PDF generated by Astra.'2026
- Listed in the Research credits for 'Introducing FrontierCode', Cognition's coding benchmark with rubric-based grading, alongside Eric Lu, Ben Pan, Deniz Birlikci, Sam Lee, Ray Wang, Rohan Choudhury, TC Qin, Carlo Baronio and Silas Alberti.2026
- Listed third in Research credits for FrontierCode 1.1 ('Eric Lu, Ben Pan, Fermi Ma, Alex Lombardi, ...'), the benchmark version SWE-1.7 reports its 42.3% headline score on.2026
- In those notes he describes his workflow verbatim: 'I would write a bullet, send it to Devin, and ask if it was the correct next step. If I got something wrong, I'd ask Devin to explain the issue, and then I'd rewrite the bullet and check again.'2026
- Assistant Professor of Computer Science at NYU's Courant Institute; research focuses on quantum computing and its interplay with cryptography, complexity theory, and physics.Sep 2025
- Co-authored with Hsin-Yuan (Robert) Huang 'How to Construct Random Unitaries' (STOC 2025, QIP 2025 plenary), proving pseudorandom unitaries exist, a question open since 2017. Quanta Magazine covered it.Oct 15, 2024
- Teaching CSCI-GA 3033 Quantum Cryptography at NYU Courant in Fall 2026.Sep 2026
- On X he follows several Cognition researchers, including Deniz Birlikci, Ben Pan, Carlo Baronio, Jeffrey Ling, and Sushant Sachdeva (U. Toronto faculty who is also a Cognition researcher), plus Cheng-Yuan (Sam) Lee, whose bio reads 'Research @cognition | prev intern @windsurf | 2x ICPC World...'. The FrontierCode research group he co-authors with includes ex-Windsurf and ICPC people. That he follows these researchers is a lead, not proof of any team assignment.Nov 2026
- Recent X activity has shifted toward LLMs. On 2026-02-06 he wrote: 'This is a very neat result: given a dataset and a target system prompt like "reply in Spanish," they show you can select a subset of the data such that fine-tuning an LLM on that subset causes the model to behave *as if* it were given that system prompt!'Feb 6, 2026This is a very neat result: given a dataset and a target system prompt like “reply in Spanish,” they show you can select a subset of the data such that fine-tuning an LLM on that subset causes the model to behave *as if* it were given that system prompt!
- Cognition, his AI employer, signed a definitive agreement to acquire Windsurf, the agentic IDE (IP, product, trademark), in July 2025, days after Google DeepMind hired Windsurf's CEO. The SWE-1.x model line he contributes to began as Windsurf's in-house models. No source shows he personally came from Windsurf.Jul 14, 2025
- Announced on X on 2025-06-05: 'This fall, I'll be joining NYU as an assistant professor of computer science. The department is betting big on quantum computing, and I'm thrilled to be part of it.'Jun 5, 2025This fall, I’ll be joining NYU as an assistant professor of computer science. The department is betting big on quantum computing, and I’m thrilled to be part of it. Come visit me in NYC!
This is a very neat result: given a dataset and a target system prompt like “reply in Spanish,” they show you can select a subset of the data such that fine-tuning an LLM on that subset causes the model to behave *as if* it were given that system prompt!
This fall, I’ll be joining NYU as an assistant professor of computer science. The department is betting big on quantum computing, and I’m thrilled to be part of it. Come visit me in NYC!
“At its best, when my colleagues and I are in sync, swapping ideas rapid-fire at the blackboard, nipping at the heels of understanding, math feels like communing with something greater. I feel so privileged to get to do this.” -@ewintang at the #BreakthroughPrize ceremony
I’m grateful to @_webbwright and @QuantaMagazine for covering my work w/ @RobertHuangHY on quantum pseudorandomness. It’s still early days for quantum computing theory: the classical analogs of these questions were settled 40 years ago!
Can efficient quantum circuits behave like truly random unitaries to any efficient observer? The existence of such circuits, called pseudorandom unitaries (PRUs), has been open since 2017. In this paper w/ @RobertHuangHY, we show that PRUs exist: https://t.co/VgURAwhnwu Thread:
