Wai Yan
Nyein Naing

A dreamer, learner, and builder.

I’m Wai Yan, a Myanmar-born AI engineer at Bosch, based in the United States. I enjoy understanding new ideas in AI, turning them into working solutions, and sharing what I learn.

My path into this field began with mechanical engineering in Myanmar and a master’s in mechatronics in Malaysia. I was drawn to robotics and learned programming from scratch. Around 2014–2015, my professor introduced me to machine learning. The possibility of teaching machines through examples sparked a curiosity that has stayed with me ever since.

That curiosity led to research in medical imaging, a PhD involving deep learning for glass-break detection, and an AI research role at Bosch Singapore. In 2022, my work brought me to Chicago. Each step opened possibilities I hadn’t fully imagined at the beginning.

What keeps me interested

I’m happiest when something I’ve learned becomes something that works: an experiment that answers a question, an application that solves a problem, or a paper or article that shares an idea with others.

My work and personal projects have taken me through machine learning, computer vision, deep learning, and language models. My open-source work includes Burmese GPT and Burmese-Coder-4B. Today, I’m deepening the engineering skills needed to take AI systems from an idea through deployment and scale, while continuing to explore my longstanding interest in robotics.

Why I share

I know how uncertain the beginning can feel when you have ambition but no clear path. Learning from others, patient effort, and encouragement helped me find mine. I want to pass some of that help forward through projects, practical explanations, and honest accounts of what I’m learning.

My grandfather’s encouragement and my faith have been important throughout this journey. I’m still learning, still building, and finding my way toward the next meaningful challenge, one step at a time.