People / Students / Class of 2024
Xubin (Carol) Lou graduated from the University of Rochester in May 2023, double majoring in Data Science and Financial Economics, with a minor in Mathematics, and completing the certificate of actuarial study. Throughout her studies, she experienced exhaustive exploration of theories and methods and developed interdisciplinary skills to solve real-life problems from different perspectives. Her undergraduate program equipped her with diverse statistical and programming techniques. She delved into Applied Statistics, Intermediate Statistical Methods, and learned to process and analyze massive data, including classification, resampling, random trees, unsupervised training, and predictive models. Additionally, she explored Data Structures & Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence, employing sophisticated algorithms like Minimax heuristic for game implementation in Java. Engaging in Data Mining and Capstone projects allowed her to gain practical experience in solving real-life challenges sponsored by different organizations. These experiences enhanced her proficiency in data analysis tools and statistical models and fueled her passion for further learning in this field. Xubin actively engaged in academic research and activities. As a research assistant at the University of Rochester Medical Center, she used computational and statistical tools to explore public health topics related to tobacco products in the CRoFT research group. Analyzing millions of tweets from Twitter and Instagram using Natural Language Processing techniques, she studied public attitudes towards tobacco-related policies. The massive data volume required her to clear and collect user-level features, analyze profile images for specific information like age, gender, and races using Face++ algorithm and M3 model. Deep learning models were employed to predict tweet features, facilitating further analysis. Advanced topic modeling techniques like Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and BERTopic revealed public perceptions of specific policies. Outside of school, she interned at Bitpush, a technology media platform specializing in blockchain and cryptocurrencies. She crawled transaction data from 200 cryptocurrency websites, integrated messages, compared benchmarks, and synthesized the information into a database for informed decision-making. The process involved analysis of WebSockets, webpage inspection, and communication with companies for necessary data. This experience forged her interpersonal and collaboration skills, and beefed up her problem-solving abilities through a business lens by grappling with complex real-life issues. In the summer 2023, she works as quantitative analyst in Foresight Fund to construct a back-testing framework for various bond investment portfolio strategies, and analyzes the effects of investment strategies under different factors. This role further develops her operational capacities in the finance industry, allowing her to explore more business value behind data. Xubin is thrilled to continue her education with Northwestern University’s MS in Machine Learning and Data Science in 2023. She is looking forward to accessing more advanced applications of data science in different industries and becoming a well-rounded data scientist in the future.
