Hi, this is Jeff. I study humans, AI, and the complicated feelings in between.

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Communication at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, advised by Professor Yi Mou, and a member of the Center for Future Media & Human-Machine Communication. I also serve as an Assistant Editor for Big Data & Society and as Student Committee Chair (2024–2026) of the Association for Chinese Communication Studies (ACCS). Before coming to SJTU, I received my B.A. in Journalism from Chongqing University.

My Chinese name is 蓝剑锋. Lan (蓝) means "blue." My given name, Jianfeng (剑锋), has two sources. The first is the Five Elements. In Chinese tradition, the year, month, day, and hour of a person's birth are read through wood, fire, earth, metal, and water, and a name can supply whichever element seems to be missing. My birth chart was found to be short on metal, so my uncle chose two metal characters from the dictionary, 剑 (sword) and 锋 (edge), which together mean "the edge of a sword." The second source is an old Chinese couplet, 宝剑锋从磨砺出，梅花香自苦寒来. A fine sword gets its edge from long grinding on the whetstone, and the plum blossom gives off its fragrance only in the bitter cold. The edge in my name, in other words, is something earned slowly, one pass of the stone at a time. It was only after I began my PhD that I truly understood the couplet. These days, somewhere between the whetstone and the winter plum, I am still working on the edge.

For years the name still felt a little too sharp. Then I watched The Lord of the Rings and met Sting, the Elvish blade that glows blue whenever orcs and goblins are near. A blue blade, it turned out, was a pretty good thing to be named after.