I am a Data Scientist at CoreCompete, Inc. in Durham, NC.

         

Did you know that data can speak?

Data can talk all about our life, and my research is to understand what it says. In my research, I carefully listen to the stories that the data tells us to discover patterns and learn about them. Then, I devise methods from what I learned from data to solve problems.

In CoreCompete, I work with a team of passionate data scientists who all help our customers and clients to solve their problems by examining their data. In our process, we meticulously dissect clients' data, investigate each part, inspect correlations, study reactions, analyze the results, and finally review our findings with our clients. We also support our clients to use the cloud technology such as Google Cloud Platform, to both accommodate and analyze the data.

You might ask how did I obtain my expertise?

Well... I graduated from University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNCC), Department of Software and Information Systems. I obtained my PhD in Software and Information Systems under supervision of my mentor and advisor Dr Mary Lou Maher. My PhD research was on recognizing patterns in student data. These patterns can be used to identify students who are at-risk of not graduating on-time. I used sequential data representation to leverage time dependency between events happening in students' academic life. I highly encourage you to read my journal article and my thesis.

I also have a background in HCI and interaction design. This made me conscious of good and bad designs in everyday things, and also I could see why developers and programmers often neglect their users in the process of producing their products!

I experienced designing interactions when I involved in The Willful Marionette project. This project was based on the collaboration of our team in UNCC and two artists, Lilla LoCurto and Bill Outcault, in residence. The goal of the Willful Marionette project was to design an engaging gestural dialogue between a 3D printed marionette and humans. To learn more about this project, check out this research article.