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Lijun Zhu

Profile
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" Scaling AI from research to production. "

I lead a 150+ person computer vision organization at Sam's Club, building AI products serving 600+ clubs. Before that, I developed ML acceleration chips at Texas Instruments.

A brief history

2025-now
Director of Computer Vision
2022-2025
Manager of Machine Learning
2018-2022
Team lead of Machine Learning

My work

"Make it work, make it right, make it fast."

— Kent Beck

Sam's Club
ISEE
Whole-store camera system for frictionless shopping and store operation automation — currently in pilot.
Sam's Club
Just Go®
Frictionless exit using computer vision and RFID — deployed in 600+ clubs nationwide.
Sam's Club
IRAS Robots
Autonomous floor-scrubbing robots that scan inventory and detect safety hazards across the store floor.
Sam's Club
Forecasting Platform
Time series ML platform serving finance, merchandising, supply chain, and in-store operations.
Texas Instruments
Model Optimization Toolkit
Pruning and quantization tools (post-training and QAT) for deploying customer models on TI chipsets.
Texas Instruments
DL Model Zoo
Pre-trained deep learning models for common CV, NLP, and ASR tasks optimized for TI hardware.
Texas Instruments
Edge AI Chips
Hardware-software co-design for binary neural network acceleration chips.

A bit about me

I play clarinet and recently taught myself piano. I love to BBQ, read widely, and teach as an adjunct professor at UT Dallas. I also make math puzzles for my kids — real math problems disguised as video game scenarios. I'm a big fan of self-hosting — I run a server rack at home to tinker with different setups — and I write about technology on this blog. I love coding and building things, and this site is one of those projects.

"An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field."

— Niels Bohr