From industry to academia — building AI that works.
MS candidate in Artificial Intelligence at Hawaii Pacific University (Spring 2025). A decade in tech. Pivoted to AI in 2021. Now formalizing production experience through academic research.
About Tao An (安涛)
Founder of AI companies serving government and enterprise clients in China, focused on legal and healthcare domains. Building production AI systems that handle real-world complexity — from document processing to intelligent decision support.
Research interests: Retrieval-Augmented Generation, LLM memory architectures, knowledge graphs.
Publications
CogCanvas: Verbatim-Grounded Artifact Extraction for Long LLM Conversations
A training-free framework that extracts verbatim-grounded cognitive artifacts from LLM conversations and organizes them into a queryable graph. Achieves 32.4% accuracy on LoCoMo (+7.8pp vs RAG) with decisive advantages on temporal reasoning (+20.6pp) and multi-hop questions.
AI as Cognitive Amplifier: Rethinking Human Judgment in the Age of Generative AI
Based on extensive experience training 500+ professionals in AI adoption since GPT-3, this position paper argues AI acts as a cognitive amplifier that magnifies existing human capabilities. Proposes a three-level model of AI engagement and advocates for strengthening domain expertise and metacognitive skills over technical prompt engineering.
Cognitive Workspace: Active Memory Management for LLMs
Proposes Cognitive Workspace, a paradigm transcending traditional RAG by emulating human cognitive mechanisms. Features active memory management, hierarchical cognitive buffers, and task-driven context optimization. Achieves 58.6% memory reuse rate (vs 0% for RAG) with 17-18% net efficiency gain.