Data scientists are leaving Southeast Asia. This Singaporean hopes to fix that.

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What’s your favorite flavor of ice cream? What about your best friend’s favorite? Imagine asking these two questions to hundreds, thousands, millions of people.

Some will have similar preferences. Certain flavors will be popular. Others, not so much.

For data scientist Thia Kai Xin, he poses similar questions to millions each day. Except on Alibaba-backed ecommerce platform, Lazada.

“My job is to write code that will teach big, powerful computers to learn the patterns of behaviors among people,” says Kai Xin. “The computers will then be able to calculate the optimal price to sell the ice creams, find groups of people with similar preferences, recommend them new flavors that they might like, and make many more predictions that will take people years to work out on their own.”

Thia Kai Xin. Photo credit: Thia Kai Xin.

Better known as the co-founder of DataScience SG, Kai Xin started his career dealing with hardware servers in SAS and Dell EMC, before moving on to explore how data could make a difference for patients at Singapore’s Khoo Teck Puat Hospital.

Among other things, he spent close to two years collecting data and measuring the risk profiles of patients to help nurses prioritize their most at-risk patients.

“I really liked the impact I made at Khoo Teck Puat,” says Kai Xin, “But to really challenge myself, I wanted to go into something of a larger scale and with more diversity. And ecommerce provided that opportunity.”

Kai Xin was one of the first few hires on the data team in Lazada, and today specializes in behavioral analytics, especially in relation to large recommendation systems that ecommerce sites like Lazada use.

He is also working concurrently on a Master of Science in computer science from Georgia Institute of Technology.

How it all started

Kai Xin never planned to become a data scientist.

“I entered the field thanks to guidance from Professor Kam at Singapore Management University (SMU),” he says. “He showed me how fun data analytics can be and how it can provide useful insights. I felt comfortable with the subject, and was motivated to learn more.”

Kai Xin worked on his first data project as an undergraduate with Soyato, a soy ice cream startup co-founded by Alan, an SMU senior of his. “It was a simple logistics optimisation model done in Microsoft Excel, but we learned a lot from the project and from Alan, who helped us understand the unique challenges of the ice cream business. It was the first time I worked with a real business client on a data project,” he says.

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