Award-winning data scientist She Yiyuan has left the United States to take up a full-time position at Westlake University in eastern China’s Zhejiang province.
She, who taught at Florida State University for almost two decades, will conduct research at his new institution as a chair professor at the school of science and the Institute for Theoretical Sciences, according to a July 1 social media post by the Chinese university.
She has won the Career Award, the most prestigious award from the US National Science Foundation to support early career scholars. He is a fellow of some of the world’s most prominent communities of statisticians, including the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He is also an elected member of the International Statistical Institute.
The statistician’s move is set to boost China’s position in emerging hi-tech sectors, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and medical sciences, amid fierce competition with the West.
Statistics, as the foundation of data science, is “an indispensable supporting discipline in fields such as machine learning and artificial intelligence”, according to Westlake University. The discipline underpins a wide range of fields, including the natural sciences, engineering, technology and social sciences.
According to the university’s website, She’s research focuses on high-dimensional statistics, machine learning, optimisation techniques, big data analysis and robust statistics, among other areas. His research takes a cross-disciplinary approach, integrating the theories, methods, and applications of statistics, mathematics and computer science.
Westlake University said that She’s research not only provided new methods for machine learning to discover patterns in complex data, but also offered effective tools and innovative approaches for data analysis in disciplines such as biomedicine and economics.
Large language models (LLMs), the technology that underpins generative AI, are advanced machine learning models with vast numbers of parameters that enable them to process and generate humanlike text, code and other data types.
However, the number of parameters in these models now far exceeds human cognitive capacity.
To tackle this challenge, She has been working to explore the intrinsic relationships behind data, with the aim of making seemingly chaotic and complex data clear and interpretable using advanced algorithms.
He obtained his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Peking University, where he received training in mathematics and computer science, before moving to the US to study statistics.
In 2008, She received his doctorate from Stanford University. He then began his faculty career in the statistics department at Florida State University, where he was promoted to full professor in 2018.
A growing number of high-profile mathematicians have chosen to return to China after decades-long careers in the United States.
At the end of June, mathematician Yitang Zhang left the US to become a full-time professor at Sun Yat-sen University in southern China. The 70-year-old number theorist has been appointed to the university’s new Institute of Advanced Studies Hong Kong, and he will live and work in the Greater Bay Area.
Shen Zhongwei, formerly a distinguished professor at the University of Kentucky, joined Westlake University full time as a chair professor of mathematics this month. Shen received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1989 and began teaching at the University of Kentucky in 1995.
- South China Morning Post
