People / Alumni / Class of 2023
Ziqiao Ao graduated with distinction from Duke Kunshan University and earned a dual degree from Duke University, both with a major in Data Science. Her undergraduate training has contributed significantly to her competencies in mathematics, computer science, and statistics and consolidated her experience in data mining, modeling, and optimization via Python, SQL, Java, and Rstudio through the application of speech recognition, neural network, time-series prediction, and NLP. With her in-depth academic background in data science and extensive professional experience in the Internet industry, Ziqiao has maintained profound technical fitness and track of the era of Data. Intending to become a competitive future data scientist, Ziqiao has made achievements in employing rigorous technological methods to address problems in economics, finance, the internet, e-commerce, etc., and has unfurled herself to these industries. Mainly, she polished her analytic skills and sharpened her industrial insight through first-hand contact with large enterprises, both local and multinational, and with analytical models and tools. Ziqiao immersed herself in industrial cases and applied data science techniques to business operations in Tencent via Python and PostgreSQL. She also joined ByteDance to support business strategies with data in a global context, where she focused on Tiktok's investment and customer incentive strategies, laying a solid foundation to form strategies for business development in the worldwide market in the future. Furthermore, in her undergraduate research, she went across the FinTech and Artificial Intelligence intersection, where she creatively combined Social Network Science with time-series forecasting (LSTM+GRU) to predict the return of cryptocurrency investment. Her research established a comprehensive network index for decentralization and optimized the current prediction models for blockchain applications. Joining as a student in the MSiA* program at Northwestern University, Ziqiao is eager to continue strengthening her technical competency and enlarging her scope toward the full breadth of an interdisciplinary spectrum covering statistics, strategy, operations, and data science. Through the program, she will be able to access a broader future with more versatility and flexibility. By experiencing the power of interdisciplinary collaboration, she will construct her multi-path ecosystem, which emphasizes both data and business and pursue a career path with data in the future.
*later renamed MS in Machine Learning and Data Science
