People / Students / Class of 2023
Yucheng Feng graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in May 2022 with a major in Statistics & Computer Science. His undergraduate coursework focused on computer programming, statistical analysis, and applied algorithms for machine learning. Yucheng learned plenty of programming languages like Python, Java, R, and C/C++ in his undergraduate CS courses. Meanwhile, Yucheng built data science insights from studies in statistics fields. With tremendous skills earned in computer science and statistics, Yucheng implemented projects such as IMDb movie review classification, GCP Pokémon database, and flight recommendation system through machine learning and computer system concepts. During his university life, Yucheng actively participated in various campus activities. For example, he served as the course assistant for the Intro to Programming CS course with a size of 500 students and hosted weekly office hours to answer questions and help with debugging. He also eagerly attended competitions like Minenopoly and HackIllinois. Outside the class, Yucheng conducted several internships. During his summer internship working for China Unicom, he cooperated with the ML department to compare and analyze market demand for AI text proofreading products using regression models programmed by R and Python. Moreover, he continued to improve the model's accuracy using a combination of NLP techniques like N-gram models and identifying stopwords in sentences by the NLTK library. Furthermore, to broadcast AI products engineered by China Unicom, Yucheng produced the AI brochure with schematic diagrams to give customers a more comprehensive intuition. More recently, Yucheng developed a video game data visualization website to assist players in gaining meaningful insights. He used KNN as the base algorithm and designed recommendation algorithms to discover similar games by user preference. All positions and projects required multiple data visualization, statistical inference, and machine learning capabilities. While technical skills are crucial to success in data science, communication, and business sense are equally important. Yucheng believed MSiA* is the solid capstone that aces his career goal. Feeling elated about coming to the MSiA program at Northwestern, Yucheng is passionate about touching with people from numerous backgrounds to overcome challenges in the modern data science career.
*later renamed MS in Machine Learning and Data Science
