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.
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.
Grade 9 · Shanghai
Three commitments, one habit: show up, do the hard part first, and don't stop until the thing actually works.
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
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
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 StoryA claim, measured. Method and numbers are in the write-up.
Shipped and in use by people who are not me.
Three minutes to pick your FTC alliance. Raw scores lie — OPR via Gaussian elimination separates signal from noise. Bayesian shrinkage, 2,000 Monte Carlo sims per pairing, synergy scoring. Pulls live data from the FTCScout GraphQL API. Bilingual (EN/ZH), auto season detection. Built by Team IK19859. Used at real competitions. Live at scoutselect.org.
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.
A five-model stacked ensemble — RandomForest, ExtraTrees, LightGBM, HistGradientBoosting, GradientBoosting blended via a Ridge meta-learner — over ~75 temporally-safe engineered features, causal ELO ratings, and a vectorised Monte Carlo engine running 10k–50k simulated races a second. Walk-forward backtested across four F1 regulation eras, 2014–2026. Rich CLI + Streamlit dashboard sharing one analysis core.
Infrastructure other FTC teams build on. Open source.
An AI plugin suite for FTC teams that refuses to guess. Five skills — team config, code generation, hardware lookup, rule check and code review — each grounded in real sources: verified rule citations, structured hardware specs, and library documentation. Config-gated, so it will not write robot code before the robot's configuration is confirmed. Python and Java over MCP; works in Claude Code, VS Code, Copilot CLI, Cursor and Gemini CLI.
A behaviour-tree decision engine for FTC: given the state of the match, the robot and the field, which behaviour should run right now, and how does it get preempted the instant that stops being true. Zero heap allocation on the steady-state tick path, so no GC jitter mid-match. Pure-Java core with no Android or FTC-SDK dependency, unit-testable off-robot, plus an FTC bridge for FTCLib and SolversLib.
A modernised command-based stack for FTC Team 19859, rebuilt on current SDK versions. SolversLib for control, Pedro Pathing for autonomous navigation, Panels telemetry, goBILDA Pinpoint localisation, Limelight3A vision. Commands, subsystems, hardware abstraction and opmodes are kept as separate layers, with ADRs, a wiring map, a six-phase bring-up checklist and GitHub Actions build validation.




A track record built across robotics, sport, debate, research, and the classroom.
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.
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.
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.
Began high school at Shanghai Pinghe Bilingual School in 2026.
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.
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.
Team Silver (2nd place) & Best Individual Presenter. Qualified for World Youth Economic Forum, Harvard Business Challenge, and ASDAN Financial Intelligence All-Star Forum.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The same tools and habits that go into robotics and rowing also apply to classrooms and communities.
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.
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.
Build nights, start lines, and the rooms in between.














Whether you're a school, a team, a collaborator, or just want to say hello — I'd love to hear from you.
I'll read it and get back to you soon.