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Xinyue (Vera) Shen

PhD Candidate

CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security

Email  /  CV  /  Scholar  /  GitHub  /  Twitter  /  LinkedIn  /  🔊Feel free to call me Xinyue (pronounced "Shin-Yueh") or Vera.

In my spare time, I...

  • Write: I've published sci-fiction novels and popular science articles since 2016.
  • Read: I enjoy a wide range of genres (just no instruction manuals).
  • Cats: I am luckily owned by two cats.

My Cats

Pop-Sci and Sci-fi Writing

People often ask why I write novels. The truth is, my love for storytelling predates my love for computer science. I started writing fantasy novels in primary school, long before I knew what programming was. When I eventually ended up in CS, the genre naturally drifted toward sci-fi and popular science, a perfect collision of two worlds I care about.

Writing is, for me, a deeply joyful and liberating process. It lets me escape technical constraint and just think: where is all of this heading? What does a world reshaped by AI actually feel like to live in? Fiction lets me push those questions to their logical extremes. It also kept me grounded in daily life, reminding me there was a world beyond research.

So, nice to meet you, in whatever form words take :D

Popular Science Publications

Some of my popular science and sci-fi publications, along with wonderful moments with my readers

Awards

  • 2026: Best Short Story Award (Original Fiction), Science Fiction Supernova Award
  • 2024: Outstanding Popular Science Work Award, China Science Writers Association
  • 2022: Chinese-Language Category Winner, The EELISA Science Fiction Contest (3.0%)
  • 2021: Light-Year Award, Beijing Association for Science and Technology (0.1%)
  • 2021: Science Fiction Starfire Award, Science Fiction in Colleges and Universities
  • 2020: Pop-science and Sci-fiction Youth Star Award, China Science Writers Association

Publications

  1. The Forsaken. Science Fiction Supernova Award, 2026.03.
  2. Autonomous Driving: From Science Fiction to Reality. Explore, 2025.09.
  3. Help! I've Fallen into the Computer! Publishing House of Electronics Industry, 2025.09.
  4. Steam, Gears, and Computers: the Old Dream of Mechanical Computing. Science Fiction World Pictorial·Amazing Science, 2025.07-08.
  5. How Machines "See" the World. Explore, 2025.03.
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