George Hu (胡敬知) · FTC, Rowing, Debate & Research

About Me

Engineer,
athlete, builder.

I'm George Hu (胡敬知), a Grade 9 student at Shanghai Pinghe Bilingual School. I build autonomous robots, train with the New Rowing Club and Pinghe School crews at 5:30 AM, and argue British Parliamentary debate in front of judges who know the topic better than I do. Between those, I write software that real people use.

The honest lesson across all three: the gap between thinking you understand something and actually understanding it is enormous, and the only way across is to be wrong, repeatedly, in public. That gap is where I do my best learning.

9

FTC awards won

3

Years rowing competitively

6th

World ranking · U19 relay

2026

FTC World Championship

George Hu · 胡敬知

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 FTC Team 19859

THE FIELD

FTC

2022 - Present · FTC Team 19859

Control systems lead, FTC Team 19859, 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

THE WATER

Competitive Rowing

2023 - Present · New Rowing Club · Pinghe School Rowing Team since 2026

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 Rowing Open 2026: 4th, Mixed Quad. 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

Projects

What I've
built.

Featured

LIGHTS OUT

IndependentLive

A full open-wheel racing game that runs in your browser: 2026-regulation cars, 26 circuits, 240 Hz physics, AI rivals, careers and multiplayer, with nothing to install.

An open-wheel car on a wet night grid under floodlights, with red start lights above.

TypeScriptthree.js (WebGPU)ViteWeb AudioWeb Workers

RowingLab

RowingLive

AI rowing technique analysis. A phone video becomes pose keypoints, segmented strokes, and nine biomechanical checks per stroke with traffic-light coaching cues. Crew mode scores a whole eight seat by seat. Camera-angle correction, honest confidence intervals, club portal, bilingual throughout, plus a native WeChat Mini Program. The whole product, video processing included, runs on one modest server. Live at rowinglab.org.

RowingLab pose skeleton tracked on a single sculler, with the line Every stroke, measured

Computer VisionPose EstimationReactPWAWeChat Mini Program

JouleRoute-LM

ResearchPublic repo

A prior simulation, rebuilt on real model weights. I attach DeeBERT-style early-exit heads to a frozen BERT-base encoder and route by softmax-entropy confidence, measuring real energy with powermetrics on Apple Silicon. Result: ~37% fewer layers and ~37% measured energy at 98.8% of baseline accuracy, with no statistically significant accuracy loss across 5 seeds. Independent research; code on GitHub.

Two real-measurement panels: accuracy versus average layers computed, and accuracy versus measured energy per example, each with the 92.43% full-depth baseline drawn as a dashed line.

PythonLLM ResearchStatisticsEnergy Measurement

BIOBUZZ Learning Studio

FTCSearch finished

A strategy tool that first taught itself in thousands of simulated matches (about 7,000 an hour on one Mac), then was rebuilt to try every combination of our robots' plans and rank the best one for each kind of alliance partner.

TypeScriptNode (tsx)ViteDSIM (Rapier physics)

All projects

10

FTC

ScoutSelect Three minutes to pick your FTC alliance Public repo
BIOBUZZ Robot Simulator Robot code, and a simulator that runs it Sim-proven. Real robot pending.
BIOBUZZ AutoTool Draw a route, get compile-checked robot code Open source
BIOBUZZ Learning Studio Strategy AI for BIOBUZZ: trained, then exhaustive search Search finished
Refract AI plugin suite for FTC teams Open source
TickTree Behaviour-tree decision engine for FTC Open source
Biozbuzz Quickstart FTC Modernised command-based stack for FTC Team 19859 Open source

Rowing

RowingLab AI rowing technique analysis Live

Research

JouleRoute-LM Early-exit inference on BERT, with measured energy Public repo

Independent

LIGHTS OUT Open-wheel racing in your browser Live
F1Predict Five-model stacked ensemble for race outcomes GitHub(opens in a new tab)

Academic Performance

Numbers that
back it up.

No specialised prep

Reading

RIT243

~95th percentile · +27 above grade norm

Literary Text · HighVocabulary · High Informational · HighLexile 1420L-1570L

Language Usage NWEA MAP

RIT248

98th percentile · +34 above grade norm

Writing · HighMechanics · HighGrammar/Usage · High

Duolingo English Test

140/160

C2 Proficient · Top 10% globally

C2 ProficientCEFR Top Band

TOEFL

110/120

July 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

FTC2022 - Present

Vice-Captain & Control Systems Lead

FTC Team 19859 · in this role since Sep 2024

Built autonomous control systems in Java using PID tuning and sensor fusion. Won Control Award (California Invitational 2025), Think Award (Beijing Qualifier 2025-26), Innovate Award (Lobster Cup International 2025). China Nationals 2025: 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

New Rowing Club · Pinghe School Rowing Team since 2026

Training 6-8 hours per week. Shanghai Rowing Open 2026: 4th, Mixed Quad Sculls. 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.

AcademicSep 2026 - 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.

Business2024-2026

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.

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

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