…and it is here to stay!

Safety

Prof. Zhong cares about safety.

He taught a systems programming course which had some interesting properties:

  1. It was in Rust.
  2. It occupied the same time slot as a C++ course.
  3. It was the dawn of LLMs (large language models), and the course was LLM-encouraged.
  4. We wrote Linux kernel modules, so we had to use Rust for Linux.

The combination of 3 and 4 was a pain, of course, as neither we nor the LLMs back then were able to excel at Rust for Linux.

Especially since Rust for Linux was not a single thing, but two; As far as I can tell, Rust for Linux was an experiment until Linus Torvalds said “yes”, then they started all over again. So the APIs we needed were in their experimental branch, but not the Linux kernel itself, since they started over and things are different.

The rust branch we were using, at time of writing, is 1551 commits ahead of and 309683 commits behind torvalds/linux:master. No degree of RAG could have helped, especially so since it was before the dawn of RAG.

The other part of the course was the lectures, which had nothing to do about systems programming, but were about philosophy, epistemology, and LLMs for public safety.

Yeah, he really cares about safety. This project is from on his research group homepage, verbatim:

AI-powered public safety (Flying drones with LLMs)

Wikipedia

So when Prof. Zhong (and his LLM-powered drones) came up in a conversation, I opened my search engine of choice (I’m wearing their T-shirt at time of writing!), and typed Lin Zhong.

I got a Wikipedia sidebar. Wow, I thought, Prof. Zhong has a Wikipedia page?

Naturally, I clicked “View History” to check the author(s).

Was it a student of his?

And no, it was by username Forrestzhong.

The user had no User: page, but Special:Contributions revealed that their only 2 edits were on this page.

Naturally, I opened my search engine again and searched "Forrestzhong", and I opened GitHub to see Prof. Zhong’s face smiling at me.

Aha. Prof Zhong Wrote His Own Wikipedia Page…?

But can you?

From hereon, WLOG, let us assume Prof. Zhong did.

Wikipedia’s policy on autobiographies, WP:AUTO, strongly discourages writing autobiographies.

But his actual Wikipedia page follows the guidance at WP:YOURSELF pretty well. I’d say it is “neutral and non-promotional”, albeit not difficult to do when it has only 9 sentences.

Notability

Wikipedia articles do not exist for a reason, and a majority of Wikipedia autobiographies suffer from notability issues.

However, since Prof. Zhong is a Fellow of both the IEEE and the ACM, that makes him unquestionably notable.

In fact, the notability guidelines at WP:PROF specifically state Fellow of the IEEE as an inclusion criterion.

Congratulations, Prof. Zhong!