About — Jason Chao

Jason Chao is a UK-based senior technologist and co-director of Hongkongers in Britain — £1.1m of grant funding secured, 10,000+ beneficiaries, and an LLM-assisted casework workflow (GPT-5 + RAG on internal reference corpora) that cut enquiry turnaround from seven days to under two. Previously at the University of Siegen, he 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.

Career

2021 — present

Co-director, Hongkongers in Britain

Scaled a grant-funded UK non-profit community organisation to 10,000+ beneficiaries; secured £1.1m in government and foundation funding 2022–2024; authored research adopted by UN treaty bodies and UK central government.

2020 — 2024

Software engineer, University of Siegen

SFB 1187 "Media of Cooperation", remote from the UK. Built AppTraffic and AppInspect; co-author on peer-reviewed methodology papers; presented at RSECon.

2017 — present

Independent technical consultant

Digital-transformation engagements for SMEs. Reporting infrastructure, data pipelines, internal tooling.

2010 — 2024

Software developer, Proton Electronics Company

Embedded and enterprise software; C# / .NET Core. Remote part-time from 2017 onwards.

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 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).