AI Builder · Founder · Community Architect

Sonya
Chen

Building at the frontier of AI — from machine learning systems serving billions to pioneering agentic legal AI, and convening the communities that shape what comes next.

3B+ Worked on large-scale projects with 3B+ monthly users at Meta
30K+ Built AI community from zero to hosting the largest AI conference in 2024
$18B+ Extensive economics and finance industry experience
3.9 GPA · UC Berkeley Master's
01

Experience

Co-Founder & CEO
Law Tech LLM
Jan 2024 – Present · Stealth Mode

Pioneering agentic legal AI that autonomously navigates legal databases and workflows. Building guardrails for lawyer-AI collaboration that resolve bottlenecks in litigation and transactional pipelines.

AI Agents Legal Tech Founder
Software Engineer
Meta
Feb 2021 – Apr 2024

Led Marketplace Search & Monetization projects including large-scale embedding models, seller-ranking features, and personalization systems. Deployed global candidate algorithms that grew DAU by 1.4M+. Also engineered ML for Instagram Friend Recommendations serving ~3B MAU.

ML Systems Search Ranking 3B+ MAU
Software Engineer
Stanford Cohen's Lab
May 2018 – Apr 2020

Built NLP pipelines to extract topics from 10,000+ psychology papers, analyzing the evolution of social psychology research. Modeled academic network connections across universities over six decades.

NLP LDA Python Research
Full-time Analyst, ECM
ICBC International
Sep 2014 – Jun 2016 · Hong Kong

Participated in 15 IPOs totaling over $18B in combined value across Energy, Real Estate, Banking, and Healthcare. Managed end-to-end deal logistics, roadshows, and stakeholder coordination.

IPO Capital Markets Finance
02

Publications & Projects

Published Paper · arXiv 2021

NT5?! Training T5 to Perform Numerical Reasoning

Co-developed a novel training schedule for adapting the T5 language model to numerical reasoning tasks over text. Implemented core model training pipeline components — dataset preprocessing, training scripts, and evaluation modules — achieving a major leap on the DROP benchmark.

Model Training T5 NLP Numerical Reasoning
45.90 → 70.83 Adjusted F1 on DROP
Read on arXiv ↗
UC Berkeley Capstone Project · 2021 · WiDS Speaker 2022

Landfill Detection In the Wild

Developed a two-stage ML pipeline leveraging Inception v3 for landfill classification and YOLO-v5 for localization on Sentinel-2 satellite imagery. Curated a novel dataset of 2,100+ global landfill sites using Google Earth Engine. Recognized at the UC Berkeley Capstone Showcase and invited to speak at Women in Data Science 2022 (WiDS) for the project's impact on climate change and methane emission reduction.

Computer Vision YOLO-v5 Inception v3 Climate Tech WiDS Speaker
0.934 ROC-AUC (classification) 0.638 mAP@0.5 (localization)
View on Berkeley iSchool ↗
03

Conferences

Co-Founder & Organizer
GenAI Summit
Nov 2022 – Present · Bay Area

Co-founded and scaled the largest GenAI community to 30,000+ members. Orchestrated a premier 3-day summit with 30,000+ attendees, securing unicorn-level executives as speakers and driving sponsorships and key partnerships.

Co-Host
Smart Living Silicon Valley AI Expo & Summit
Jan 2026 · Computer History Museum

Co-hosted a 2,000-attendee AI summit curating the agenda for Smart Living, AIoT, and Health Tech. Featured a fireside chat with Dylan Patel (SemiAnalysis) and a panel on AI Drug Discovery. Secured Peter Norvig (Stanford HAI / Google) as keynote speaker.

2,000attendees
smartlivingsv.com ↗
Event & Marketing Lead
Asian American Scholar Forum (AASF)
2024 & 2025 · Bay Area

Led the inaugural annual meeting marketing campaign, driving ticket sales to nearly 1,000 attendees. Orchestrated high-profile events and private banquets for Nobel laureates and US officials including Steven Chu and Elaine Chao, and organized student tours of Stanford's research labs.

~1,000attendees
aasforum.org ↗
Event & Media Marketing
Future Science Prize — 10th Anniversary
2025 · Shanghai

Supported strategic planning and operations for the 10th Anniversary Ceremony of one of China's most prestigious science awards. Coordinated VIP relations for international scientists and officials, and executed media outreach enhancing visibility across major platforms.

10thanniversary
futureprize.org ↗
04

Community & Leadership

WiDS

Women in Data Science · Speaker

Invited speaker at WiDS 2022 for landfill detection research, highlighting the intersection of satellite imagery, machine learning, and climate change impact.

Advisory

Healthcare Stealth Project

Co-designed decentralized healthcare data business model, brokered investor access, secured initial funding, and authored technical whitepapers on tokenized health exchange.

2024–

Law Tech LLM · CEO

Pioneering agentic legal AI that autonomously navigates legal databases and workflows, building guardrails for lawyer-AI collaboration.

05

Education

UC Berkeley
Master of Information and Data Science
Graduated December 2021
University of Southern California
Bachelor of Arts, Economics
Marshall Business Finance Minor
Aug 2010 – May 2014
06

Let's connect

Whether you're building at the frontier of AI, exploring an investment, or organizing events — I'd love to hear from you.