About me
Hi, I’m River Shen. My Chinese name is 沈書禾 (Shu-He Shen). I study information management at Soochow University in Taiwan, and I’m currently applying to graduate school.
I’m the kind of person who builds first and asks questions later. Instead of staying in the classroom, I spent my undergraduate years building systems, taking on industry projects and trying to turn a product into a company with friends. In the end I also wrote papers. Looking back, it was all one thread: run into a real problem, find a way to solve it, then want to know how well I actually solved it.
What I work on
- RAG and information retrieval: getting an AI to find the right material when it answers, and to say where that material came from.
- Backend and system design: turning that into a system that can actually go live, with permissions, without falling apart.
- Research methods and experiment design: once the system is built, answering “is it really better?” properly.
- Data analysis
How I went from building systems to writing papers
At first I only wanted a RAG system for a farmers’ association to run reliably. Off-the-shelf frameworks could not handle their document structure, citation tracing and permission requirements, so I ended up redesigning the architecture myself.
As I kept changing things, questions started to appear. Did my changes actually make it better? Compared to what? Which design choice was the one that mattered?
A feeling that it got faster does not answer those questions. So I added baselines, designed experiments and wrote up the results. That became my first paper, and I went to Hangzhou to present it.
What I took from this: building a system is one thing, and being able to explain why it works is another. I want to do both.
What I believe
A useful system is not about how new the technology is. It is about whether it solves the problem under a pile of real-world constraints. There is a long road between “it runs” and “people actually use it”, and that road is the part I find most interesting.
About this site
This is where I keep my research and projects, along with things I jot down. The posts do not promise to be well organised, but they are my own thinking.
Contact
Email is the fastest way to reach me: riveracademic@icloud.com.