With more than 500 million smart mobile devices in active use every day, China is the biggest mobile market in the world. For most Chinese people today, mobile devices have become an essential part of daily life. TalkingData is China's biggest third-party mobile data platform. We have collected user behavior data from more than 70% of the active mobile devices in China. Our clients include many industry leaders from diverse fields such as finance, real estate, advertising, automobile, and retail, all of which benefit from big data in terms of business decision making and improved ROI.
While servicing our business clients, we came to the realization that even though we did not have access to the audience's demographic information, it was one of the most important components of data. We believe that mobile devices' behavioral data has a high degree of correlation with the users' age and gender, therefore we have devised rules to predict this information. For example, eSport gamers are presumed to be male while Beauty app users are presumed to be female. However, this current approach is highly inadequate because of two reasons. First: We may not be able to correctly predict the user demographic of a certain app, therefore our man-made rules can be seriously defective. Second, not all users have installed Apps that have strong gender and age tendencies, and thus even 100% accurate algorithms cannot be used to cover all device users.
In order to offer a better solution to this real business problem, we are aiming to crowd-source data science minds from all over the world. We will provide anonymized mobile device behavioral data—something unique to TalkingData—to those who want to challenge themselves in the field of data science. We are hoping to obtain a highly accurate predictive model for user demographics.
Yangcheng (YC) Huang
CDO, TalkingData
Mr. Yangcheng Huang, CDO of TalkingData, specializes in mobile app data analysis and data mining. Before joining TalkingData, YC was the principal architect of technology center for telecom industry at BEA, where he was responsible for R&D and technical support of the company's WebLogic/Tuxedo middleware. After BEA was acquired by Oracle, he worked as the principal architect of solution center at Oracle (China) and was responsible for architecture design and implementation of the company's strategic projects.
Carlos Guestrin
Co-Founder & CEO, Turi
Professor Carlos Guestrin is the Amazon Professor of Machine Learning in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington and co-founder and CEO of Turi (formerly GraphLab, Inc.). As a world-recognized leader in the field of Machine Learning, Professor Guestrin was named one of the 2008 "Brilliant 10" by Popular Science Magazine. He also received the 2009 IJCAI Computers and Thought Award for his contributions to artificial intelligence, and a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).
Zhitao (Tony) Yan
VP of R&D, TalkingData
As the VP of R&D at TalkingData, Tony plays a leading role in the development of the company's data management platform (DMP), data observatory, big data computing platform, and other products. Currently Tony focuses on the construction of a big data computing platform that integrates multiple computing models and supports machine learning and data mining. With more than 15 years of experience in the IT industry, Tony has worked as CDL Senior Architect at IBM, APAC Chief Middleware Technical Advisor of Oracle, and APAC Chief Middleware Technical Advisor of BEA.
Xiatian Zhang
Chief Data Scientist, TalkingData
Mr. Xiatian Zhang has long engaged in data mining and machine learning research and has dozens of research papers in publication and sufficient patents. Xiatian is now responsible for mobile big data mining, ML algorithm research and implementation at TalkingData. He used to work for IBM China research institute, Tencent data platform, and Huawei Noah's ark Lab.
Danny Bickson
Co-Founder, Turi
Dr. Danny Bickson was a project scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, where he worked on the GraphLab PowerGraph project from its early stage. Dr. Bickson’s applied research focuses on distributed algorithms, machine learning and big data.
Ning (Joy) Qi
Founder & CTO, SegmentFault
Mr. Ning Qi is the founder and CTO of SegmentFault and a full-stack engineer. Before founding SegmentFault, Joy worked for Yahoo-Koubei, Alibaba and MagnetJoy Games. He also initiated the open-source blog Typecho. In 2012, Joy started SegmentFault Beta with two co-founders. With the community influence of Typecho, SegmentFault quickly gathered 2,000 registered users. Currently, SegmentFault has over a million users and has become the most active developer community in China.
