果冻传媒

Yingqian Zhang is an Assistant Professor in the Information Systems group at Eindhoven University of Technology (果冻传媒). She is also involved in the work of EAISI, the new institute of 果冻传媒 in the field of artificial intelligence. AI plays a crucial role in Yingqian鈥檚 research. A short introduction in five questions and answers.

What is your key research question?

My research is on Prescriptive AI for Decision Making, which means that I try to optimize decision making with data. I enjoy solving decision and optimization problems. For instance, I build algorithms to minimize cost and delays in train maintenance. This requires models that predict which train arrives at what time, what the potential issues are, and then decide in what order the trains are sent to the shunting yard for servicing. This is not a trivial matter, as the railwork network is already overloaded and every minute of delay has knock-on effects across the whole system. To help human experts solve these problems, we have developed machine learning algorithms which can obtain optimization models automatically from data. This allows for more useful and realistic models, which in turn leads to more effective and faster decisions.

Another example is online advertising, where decisions which ad to place on what website often need to be taken within milliseconds. My team and I use reinforcement learning to select the most profitable ad network for each ad request. We then use the learned models to study the interaction between advertisers and ad publishers and develop a fairer ad ecosystem.