As we keep you up to speed with the exciting progress of Hive & the great brands we're working with... we also want to take the opportunity to introduce you to some of the amazing people building the Hive platform.
Today you'll get a chance to meet Suzy Xu who is leading a lot of Hive's AI/ML efforts (and who, it turns out, is an amazing painter).
I lead a lot of our data science work. A mix of AI/ML, with theory, to unlock meaning within the large data sets we're working with. Trying to understand the bigger picture in this fascinating data to explain human decision making at scale.
I first got into psychology back in college. Like it is for many people, college was a time I spent exploring questions about what makes us who we are and what determines human behavior. I enjoyed studying these questions from two different angles.
(1) Who we are and how this is expressed in mediums like art & poetry. I majored in painting as an undergraduate, and enjoyed making large-scale realistic and abstract portraiture. Below is one of my paintings (45” x 60”).
(2) How our biology and brains determine who we are and how we think. Changes in the brain lead to changes in human behavior. Determining how differences in brain activity are related to differences in both behavior and thought is very interesting for me. During college, I took classes in biology and psychology outside of my major.
After a brief stint painting and waiting tables in New York, I decided I wanted to focus on pursuing these questions from a scientific angle more. I moved to Texas to work in a psycholgy lab for a couple years to obtain the necessary skills to transition from art into neuroscience. Once in graduate school, I took my first stats class where I fell in love with the data side of these challenges. I decided to focus on computational neuroscience, and took statistics and math courses throughout graduate school.
Throughout the rest of my doctoral research and post-doctoral research, I studied how the brain perceived smell by analyzing large datasets from brain recordings. I applied statistics and AI/ML techniques to look at how patterns of neural activity across different cells encode messages in the brain, an area of research known as neural coding. After about a decade of this research, I wanted to use the expertise I had gained in analyzing large, complex datasets to ask new, exciting questions.
Hive's framework integrates theory and cutting edge research from multiple scientific fields. Often in academia, you focus on a very narrow and specialized field of research, and I was excited to get the chance to bridge research areas, coming from both theoretical and data driven angles. Also, Hive works with some of the biggest brands in the world. This provides an opportunity to tie research backed theory with real world data to understand behavior and solve tangible problems in an impactful way. Hive is taking a big picture approach to understanding human behavior, or in this case customer behavior, and it makes for a fun and interesting data analysis problem!
Though I’m not particularly talented at it, I love learning languages. As an enthusiast of Korean cooking, I started learning Korean during Covid. Food and languages are fun lenses into learning about other cultures, so I love learning about both! Currently, I have been enjoying studying Chinese.
