Tianli got his Ph.D. from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, studying principles of 3D vision and computer rendering in the midst of a corn field. After graduation in 2006, he spent two years in Motorola Labs teaching various vision tricks to those little devices called "cell phones". In 2008, he was tired of life in a big corporation and joined a small startup in bay area (like.com), where he wrote many machine learning algorithms to recognize shoes, patterns, genres, and other magics that help users discover their style. Like.com is acquired by google in 2010, which unfortunately put him back into another big (hopefully different) corporation.