Ce Guo (/tsə ɡwɔː/) is a programmer who occasionally attempts to write research papers. He works on reconfigurable computing and computational risk management: making causal discovery and market simulation fast enough to be worth doing, searching hardware design spaces under resource constraints, and building models that can be asked why. He is also a GARP-certified Financial Risk Manager (FRM), which gives him a perfectly respectable excuse to worry about money professionally.

Imperial College London employs him as a Research Fellow in the Department of Computing, probably because he has little patience for compiler warnings, or for conclusions with no working shown. He encourages students to build things that run, then publish the code so others can check whether they do. His papers are heavy on block diagrams and untidy time-series plots, and light on confident stories that take the place of careful reasoning. These priorities are regularly rewarded with polite rejection. This has done little to reduce the confidence with which he tells students how to get published. He does, after all, have considerable experience of how not to get published. Occasionally, something goes wrong and he or his students win an award: at ASAP (2013), FCCM (2015, 2024), ICAIF (2025) and FPT (2026).

Ce would probably have an easier life if he could stop wondering why different things work in much the same way. Robot arms, financial markets and processors look less different to him than they probably should. The same few shapes keep turning up in different fields under different names. Recognising them means having less to learn from scratch, so he regards this curiosity as a labour-saving measure. To him, much of understanding is finding a shorter description of what initially looked complicated. He likes explanations that are compact, explicit, and easy to prove wrong. He prefers mistakes to be cheap and bad news to arrive early. Programming is good for this. A machine can tell him he is wrong several hundred times before lunch, which he considers rather helpful.