Team
Small on purpose. Each of us covers something the others can't.
Board of Directors
Practitioners and researchers who guide our curriculum, our clinical practice, and our use of AI. They review learning paths, weigh in on tricky calls, and keep the work grounded in what actually helps children.
Weiwei Yang
Retired Professor, School of Computer Science, HUST
Brings decades of computer science research and teaching experience. Advises on curriculum structure, learning-path design, and the pedagogy behind how skills are broken down and taught.
Yuling Song
Business Owner · Autism Advocate
Business owner and advocate for the Horizon Autism Program in New York City. Brings a family-and-community perspective to the board — what autistic children and their families actually need from a program, and what makes it work in practice.
Jammie Lion
RBT
Registered Behavior Technician working with autistic children every week. Tells us when a worksheet reads fine on paper but falls apart in a real session with a real child.
Zhipeng Liu
Recommendation & Reinforcement Learning, Salesforce
Expert in recommendation systems and reinforcement learning. Advises on how to match children with the right learning paths and how to adapt content over time based on progress — safely and with strong privacy protections.
Rui Min
Machine Learning Researcher, Booz Allen Hamilton
Machine learning researcher with over 15 patents awarded in AI. Advises on the technical direction of our ML systems — assessment modeling, personalization, and how to build AI that actually helps children learn rather than just chasing metrics.
Volunteers
Kyler Min
Student Founder
Founded Hope In Steps — led it through 501(c)(3) approval and other organizational membership certifications, builds the AI models and business logic, manages volunteers and the organization's finances, and runs activities directly with autistic children in our student panel and with our client families.
Serena Xu
Student Volunteer · Chapter Director & Director of Research
Student volunteer directing our California Chapter and leading our research work — a joint research effort with professors from Stanford University, shaping how we study what works with autistic learners and how we expand our volunteer network on the West Coast.
Ella Xu
Volunteer
BACB-certified volunteer. Works directly with autistic children through table exercises and group activities, and helps families use our learning materials.
Beyond the named folks: parents who let us run rough drafts with their kids, teachers who flag a broken worksheet, speech-language folks who catch things we would not.
If you want to help, we are always short on people who can look at a worksheet and say "this is going to confuse a seven year old." Write to us.