Experience

Independent Consulting

Independent Consultant & Product Manager: business transformation, Web3 product management, proprietary AI research, and data/ML training

Apr 2026 - Present

Contractor: Business Transformation Consultant

Apr 2026 - Present
MMI Capital

Frontend Web Developer

Aug 2025 - Present

Education

BSc (Hons), First Class Honours · Applied Mathematics with Computing

Oct 2022 - Oct 2025

Foundation · Science

Oct 2021 - Oct 2022

Awards

KPJ Healthcare K.R.A.F.T. Challenge 2025

Top 12

Nov 2025
Talentbank Boardroom Challenge 2025

Future Founder Award, Top 15 Finalist

Nov 2025
CodeNection Hackathon 2025

Mentor

Oct 2025
PayHack 2025

Consolation Prize

Aug 2025
Alibaba Cloud AI Hackathon 2025

Top 13 Finalist

May 2025
Hack The Future

Best Presenter

May 2025
JomHack Varsity Challenge 2025

Participant

Apr 2025
Universiti Malaya Hackathon 2025

4th runner-up

Apr 2025
PayHack 2024

Semi-finalist

Dec 2024
Data Science Digital Race 2024

Finalist

Oct 2024

Certifications

Databricks Fundamentals
Issued Apr 2026

Grants

Kuok Foundation Scholar

Undergraduate scholarship awarded by the Kuok Foundation.

Oct 2024
HuaZong Education Fund

Study grant awarded by the HuaZong Education Fund.

Apr 2024
KIT Foundation Scholarship

Scholarship awarded by the KIT Foundation.

May 2023
UTAR Scholarships for Top Achievers

Merit-based tuition scholarship for academic performance at UTAR.

Oct 2022
UTAR Scholarships for Top Achievers (Pre-U)

Merit-based tuition scholarship for the UTAR Foundation programme.

Oct 2021

Open Source

12 Mar 2026
Details

Added type annotations to sympy.utilities.exceptions, covering SymPyDeprecationWarning, sympy_deprecation_warning and ignore_warnings. The patch uses a TYPE_CHECKING guard to keep collections.abc out of the runtime import path. It was reviewed and merged into SymPy master.

  • Python
  • Type Annotations
  • Open Source
  • SymPy

Volunteering

Mentor & Judge, KitaHack 2026
Google Developer Groups on Campus Malaysia

Mentored participating teams and judged project submissions.

Mar 2026
Hackathon Mentor
CodeNection

Mentored student teams throughout the hackathon.

Oct 2025

Memberships

Kuok Foundation

Member of the Kuok Foundation scholars community.

2025 - Present

Publications

The Primacy of Information Design Over Algorithm Selection in Multi-Agent Cooperation
Jien Weng Lai, Wei Lun Tan, Ying Loong Lee and Ming Fai Chow · IEEE Social Computation · Under review
Apr 2026
Abstract

A full-factorial experiment in the Public Goods Game shows that information regime and incentive strength explain 85.8% of cooperation-rate variance; algorithm choice accounts for just 3.8%. Agents with the least information cooperate most (83% versus 42% under full observation), attributable to state-space compression. TreeSHAP and Shapley-variance decomposition confirm information structure, not algorithm selection, as the primary design lever for cooperation.

  • Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
  • Public Goods Game
  • Information Design
  • Cooperation
Jien Weng Lai · SSRN · Published
Apr 2026
Abstract

Studies optimal trade execution strategies that incorporate predictive alpha signals, bridging market microstructure theory with practical quantitative trading.

  • Quantitative Finance
  • Optimal Execution
  • Alpha Signals
  • Market Microstructure