Cai holds an MASt/MMath in pure mathematics from the University of Cambridge and a PhD in theoretical computer science from the University of Bath; their thesis was entitled “Graphical Foundations for Dialogue Games” and was supervised by Professors John Power and Guy McCusker, giving them an Erdős number of 3.  Since then, Cai has worked as a postdoc on computational models in cognitive science and neuroimaging at the Universities of Lancaster and Cambridge.  They joined the Institute for Data and AI (IDAI) in 2023.