Pingfan Hu

Pingfan Hu - Systems Engineering PhD in data science, transportation systems, and open-source software; co-founder of Alkaline Software, maker of the Emaki agentic development environment.

Welcome to my website!

I have defended my PhD in Systems Engineering at George Washington University, advised by Professor John Helveston, and the degree will be conferred in December 2026. My research uses data science and quantitative modeling to study human behavior in transportation systems. I develop open-source software for survey design and discrete choice modeling, and build full-stack research applications with , Python, Quarto, Shiny, and PostgreSQL. With Professor Helveston, I run Alkaline Software, an app development studio that builds apps in Rust with GPUI. Our flagship product is Emaki, an Agentic Development Environment (ADE). A traditional IDE is built around editing files; Emaki is built around the coding-agent sessions that now write much of the code.

Research Interests:

  1. Data Science: I study human behavior in transportation systems using discrete choice models and scenario simulation, focusing on smart charging adoption and economy to generate policy suggestions for policymakers and utilities.
  2. Open-Source Software: I develop open-source tools for survey research, including surveydown, a programmable, markdown-based survey platform built on Quarto, Shiny, and PostgreSQL, and its companion GUI sdstudio.
  3. Agentic AI Engineering: I build reproducible workflows around Claude Code with plugins, skills, MCPs, and hooks. I document the tutorials and my own workflows in my blog, and run a workshop on GW TAI for researchers and developers.