About Skills Projects Timeline Robotics Rowing Debate Achievements Let's Talk
Available for schools & opportunities — 2026
Robotics · Rowing · Debate · Builder — Shanghai, China
Currently
Grade 9 · Shanghai Pinghe
Representing
China · 2026
Seeking
Research & Collaborators
Fields
Engineering · Sport · Debate · Research

George Hu

FTC World Championship finalist. World #6 in U19 relay. Shanghai Dream Regatta 2026: Gold & Bronze. Nanjing 2026: Gold & Silver. CISDAC Team Champion. U14 Best Speaker, Shanghai IT 2026. Self-taught builder who ships things for real users.

2026
FTC Worlds
#6
World Rank · Rowing
95th
MAP Percentile
Gold
Nanjing 2026
About Me

Engineer,
athlete, builder.

I'm George Hu (胡敬知) — a Grade 9 student at Shanghai Pinghe Bilingual School. I like understanding how things work, then making them work better. That impulse has taken me from writing autonomous routines for a robot that captained the Finalist Alliance at the 2026 World Championship in Istanbul, to pulling an oar at dawn on the Huangpu, to shipping software projects nobody asked me to build.

The thread that connects all of it is the same: figure out the system, put in the reps, and build something real. Whether the system is a PID loop, a rowing stroke, or an argument in a debate round, the process never changes — and that's what I love about it.

9
FTC awards won
3
Years rowing competitively
6th
World ranking — U19 relay
2026
FTC World Championship
George Hu · 胡敬知
George Hu Grade 9 · Shanghai
What I Do

Where I
invest my time.

Three commitments, one habit: show up, do the hard part first, and don't stop until the thing actually works.

FTC competition robot built by Team IK19859
THE FIELD

FTC Robotics

Sep 2024 — Present · Team IK19859

Control systems lead, Team IK19859 — four FTC seasons. Every line of Java I write decides the robot's movement in a 30-second autonomous with no human on the controller. First Chinese team to reach Champion Alliance at California Invitational 2025. At the Istanbul Premier Event 2026 we captained the Finalist Alliance and took 2nd for the Innovate Award.

Full Story
Sculling at golden hour on open water
THE WATER

Competitive Rowing

2023 — Present · Shanghai Youth Rowing Team

5:30 AM, fog on the water. Three years, every season including winter. Sweep and sculling both. I film every practice, track every split, help set race strategy. World #6 at WRICH 2026. Shanghai Dream Regatta 2026: Gold & Bronze. Nanjing 2026: Gold & Silver.

Full Story
Speaking at a British Parliamentary debate round
THE FLOOR

BP Debate

Ongoing · British Parliamentary Format

Fifteen minutes of prep. Then you stand, half a case ready, room waiting for you to fail. BP taught me to find the weak joint in an argument while building my own — under a timer, in front of judges who know the topic better. CISDAC Team Champion. Yale Global Rounds.

Full Story
Selected Work

What I've
built.

Research

A claim, measured. Method and numbers are in the write-up.

Products

Shipped and in use by people who are not me.

Developer tools

Infrastructure other FTC teams build on. Open source.

8 More Builds GHCountdown · ApexType · Nova SMP · Flight Network · Depowhiteboard · GHutils · DailyCLI · Velora Full write-ups →
Academic Performance

Numbers that
back it up.

NWEA MAP Growth Duolingo English Test
No specialised prep
ReadingNWEA MAP
RIT243
~95th percentile · +27 above grade norm
Literary Text · HighVocabulary · High Informational · HighLexile 1420L–1570L
Language UsageNWEA MAP
RIT248
98th percentile · +34 above grade norm
Writing · HighMechanics · HighGrammar/Usage · High
Duolingo English TestDET
140/160
C2 Proficient · Top 10% globally
C2 ProficientCEFR Top Band
TOEFLTOEFL
110/120
Jul 2026 · No previous training
New scale · 5.5No previous training
Timeline

Competing,
building, &
leading.

A track record built across robotics, sport, debate, research, and the classroom.

What I do now

Ongoing commitments
RoboticsSep 2024 — Present

Vice-Captain & Control Systems Lead

FTC Team IK19859

Built autonomous control systems in Java using PID tuning and sensor fusion. Won Control Award (California Invitational 2025), Think Award (Beijing Qualifier), Innovate Award (Lobster Cup International). China Nationals Finalist Alliance Runner-up. At the 2026 World Championship Premier Event in Istanbul: Finalist Alliance Captain and 2nd place for the Innovate Award.

Rowing2023 — Present

Competitive Rower

Shanghai Youth Rowing Team

Training 6–8 hours per week. Shanghai Dream Regatta 2026: Gold — University Men's Eights & Bronze — Men's Doubles. Nanjing 2026: Gold — Mixed Eight Sweep & Silver — Quad Sculls. SSSA 2026: U16 Male Relay Champion. WRICH 2026: World #6 U19 Mixed Relay, World #29 U17 Men 1000m.

DebateOngoing · 5+ years

Debater & Team Champion

British Parliamentary & World Scholar's Cup

CISDAC Open Division Team Champion. World Scholar's Cup — Gold & Silver medals at Regional (Shanghai), National (Xiamen), and Yale Global Rounds. SIDO competitor 2024, 2025 & 2026. GDC 2026: 5/6 qualification rounds won. Shanghai IT 2026: U14 Best Speaker · Schools outrounds finalist. 10+ hrs/week of BP format training.

Academic2026 — Present

Student · Grade 9

Shanghai Pinghe Bilingual School

Began high school at Shanghai Pinghe Bilingual School in 2026.

The record

Dated results, most recent first
BusinessAug 2026

Bronze Award · Global Junior Division Finals

World Youth Economic Forum

Reached the Global Junior Division Finals of the World Youth Economic Forum and took Bronze, plus three category awards: Master in Business Insights, Best Entrepreneurship, and People's Choice.

Research2026

AI Research Author

JouleRoute-LM · Independent Research

Independent research: early-exit inference on real model weights (BERT-base / SST-2), following BranchyNet and DeeBERT. Frozen backbone, 12 trained exit heads, entropy-threshold routing, a simulated battery budget, and real powermetrics energy on an M5 MacBook Air. Key result: ~37% fewer layers / ~37% energy at 98.8% of baseline accuracy, with no significant accuracy change (5 seeds, paired permutation + bootstrap). Hosted at GitHub · N0v4ont0p.

Business2024–2025

Business Competitor

ASDAN Asia Business Challenge

Team Silver (2nd place) & Best Individual Presenter. Qualified for World Youth Economic Forum, Harvard Business Challenge, and ASDAN Financial Intelligence All-Star Forum.

Academic2022 — 2026

Student · Grades 6–8

SMIC Private School, Shanghai

School Captain (Primary School). Class Academic Monitor. Red Star Award recipient. English Week Chair & Emcee. Pudong District Children's Congress Delegate. MAP Growth: Reading 95th %ile, Language Usage 98th %ile.

Science2019–2020

Science Competitor

Early Science & Innovation

Started systematic science exploration at age 4. World Odyssey of the Mind — International Gold Medal (2019). ICW International Silver Medal (2020). Cross-disciplinary competition background that established a foundation for engineering and robotics.

April 2026Debate
On being publicly wrong

BP debate is the only activity I've found where being wrong in front of an audience is the mechanism, not a side effect. The round doesn't end when you run out of arguments — it ends on a timer. You have to keep building even when you've spotted the hole in your own case. I've started applying this to debugging: don't stop the run just because something looks wrong. Finish the iteration.

March 2026Rowing
What the 5:30 alarm actually teaches

Three years of rowing has produced one non-obvious lesson: the hardest part isn't the training session — it's the decision at 5:30 in the dark, before you're fully awake, to not negotiate with yourself. Once you're out the door the body figures it out. The skill being practiced is not endurance; it's pre-commitment. I think about that every time I'm tempted to skip a difficult debugging session.

February 2026Research
Why I built a simulator before writing a paper

For JouleRoute I had a hypothesis but no dataset. The honest path was to build the environment that would generate the data — a Python simulator with controlled variables and real statistical tests. It took longer than just writing the idea down. But the result is that I actually know whether it works, instead of having an interesting argument about whether it should. Building the test before the claim changes how confident you need to be before you start.

Essays · Thought

How I
build.

Read all essays →
Community & Service

Building people,
not just systems.

The same tools and habits that go into robotics and rowing also apply to classrooms and communities.

01
Gracious Professionalism
Gracious Professionalism

In FTC, the highest standard isn't just winning — it's winning while helping others get better. I've shared autonomous code strategies with competing teams, run split-tracking systems for rowing teammates, and used debate's HOLA method to teach argument structure to students in lower years. Excellence means less if it stops with you.

02
Civic Leadership
Pudong Children's Congress

Elected delegate to the Pudong District Children's Congress — Shanghai's youth civic forum. Represented SMIC students in cross-school policy discussions on education and community. The experience shaped how I think about systems beyond code: policies are a kind of infrastructure too, and the people they affect deserve to be heard.

In Frames

Four years,
in frames.

Build nights, start lines, and the rooms in between.

Robot build in progress
Competition robot beside a trophy
CAD render of the IK19859 robot
Team mascot
2025 season robot
Rowing squad on the dock
Training session on the water
Quad sculls mid-race
Sculling race start
Sculling race at pace
Mid-stroke at full power
Crew driving through the stroke
Carrying the boat to the water
Debate trophies and medals
Get In Touch

I'm always looking for the
next problem worth solving.

Whether you're a school, a team, a collaborator, or just want to say hello — I'd love to hear from you.

Message sent.

I'll read it and get back to you soon.

Or reach me directly —
george@georgehu.org