About — Jason Chao

Jason Chao is a UK-based senior technologist, currently co-director of Hongkongers in Britain — a grant-funded non-profit reaching 10,000+ people across every UK region.

At HKB, he secured £1.1m of grant funding 2022–2024 and shipped an LLM-assisted casework workflow (GPT-5 with retrieval-augmented generation over internal reference corpora) that cut enquiry turnaround from seven days to under two.

Before that, four years at the University of Siegen built AppInspect and AppTraffic — Python / PySpark / Parquet data pipelines and Dockerised mobile-sandbox tooling now used by researchers at 8+ European universities, with methodology published in New Media & Society and Convergence. Recent open-source side projects include MAGI, a multi-LLM deliberation engine, and a UK local-elections forecast comparator.

Career

2021 — present

Co-director, Hongkongers in Britain

£1.1m grant funding secured 2022–2024; 10,000+ beneficiaries across every UK region; research adopted by UN treaty bodies and the UK Government. LLM-assisted casework, monitoring-evaluation-learning (MEL) pipelines, and grant operations.

2020 — 2024

Researcher (research software development), University of Siegen

Remote from the UK; working with PI Prof. Carolin Gerlitz. Designed and built AppTraffic and AppInspect as a research software developer; co-author on peer-reviewed methodology papers in New Media & Society and Convergence; presented at the 7th Research Software Engineering Conference.

2017 — present

Independent technical consultant

Digital-transformation engagements for SME clients — automated business-intelligence reporting that cut report-generation time by 70%, data-capture tooling that cut data-entry time by 80%, and internal pipelines.

2010 — 2024

Software developer, Proton Electronics Company

C# / .NET Core for embedded and enterprise software; remote part-time from the UK from 2017. Pre-AI-coding-era hand-written work — including a MIFARE Classic system hardening that eliminated cloned-card use at a client property, and a mobile exhaust-gas examination system delivered to a government agency on a two-month timeline.

Education

2018 — 2019

MA, Human Rights Law (Merit)

SOAS, University of London.

2017 — 2018

MSc, Big Data and Digital Futures (Distinction)

University of Warwick. Dissertation: Appcestry — a tool for the study of mobile-application similarities.

Qualifications

2026

PRINCE2 (PRojects IN Controlled Environments) v7 Practitioner & Foundation

PeopleCert, February 2026.

2024

CELTA

Cambridge English, November 2024. Teaching English to adult speakers of other languages.

Publications

Chao, J., van Geenen, D., Gerlitz, C. & van der Vlist, F. N. (2024). Digital methods for sensory media research: Toolmaking as a critical technical practice. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 30(1), 236–263. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565241226791

Pilipets, E. & Chao, J. (2025). Noise in sonic social media: Memetic soundscapes of Deep TikTok. New Media & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448251358752

Omena, J. J., Lobo, T., Tucci, G., Bitencourt, E., de Keulenaar, E., Kerche, F. W., Chao, J., Liedtke, M., Li, M., Paschoal, M. L. & Lavrov, I. (2024). Quali-quanti visual methods and political bots: A cross-platform study of pro- & anti-bolsobots. Journal of Digital Social Research, 6(1), 50–73. https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v6i1.215

Talks

7th Research Software Engineering Conference (RSECon 2023), September 2023 — Pre-processing Android application packages (APKs) for static analysis at scale.
PyData London Meetup, April 2023 — The journey of building a Wordle solver.

Policy

UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) — research submission on behalf of Hongkongers in Britain, reflected in the CESCR concluding observations on the United Kingdom adopted at the 77th session (early 2025).
UN Human Rights Committee (HRC) — authored research submissions whose recommendations were adopted in HRC concluding observations at the 135th session (July 2022).