Ada Zhang

About Me

I'm Ada, a Data Scientist with a passion for uncovering insights from data and making data-driven decisions. Currently, I work on AI and machine learning solutions for aerospace and air traffic control at NASA. I'm also a calligrapher and classical violinist. Welcome to my personal website!

Why I Chose Data Science

John Tukey (often regarded as the Father of Data Science) once said, “The best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone's backyard.” This quote resonated deeply with me and was a major reason why I pursued statistics, which naturally led me to data science. Data science is domain-agostic -- it’s applicable to pretty much any field!

Data science is a perfect blend of programming and statistics. In high school, A.P. Statistics was my favorite class. I enjoyed my coding classes in college and the logical problem-solving they required. Data science is the perfect combination of these two subjects, bringing the best of both worlds together.

Also, data science aligns with my personality. I like organization, and data scientists need to organize their data in order to make sense of it! My friends tell me "you're the most organized person I know." I like to make decisions based on data, which is the heart of data science! Also, I like details. Just like a data scientist should validate their results, I naturally double-check everything, ensuring accuracy and reliability in my work.

It’s All in the Name

Ada is a very technical name, for several reasons. Ada Lovelace was the world’s first computer scientist, there's a programming language called Ada, and it rhymes with "data." These connections to artificial intelligence are purely coincidental. When my parents named me, they had no idea I would go into AI!

Ada sounds like the Greek letter eta, η, which is the learning rate in the gradient descent algorithm. I LOVE to learn (as a child, I’d count down the days until school started)! There is another, more advanced version of the vanilla gradient descent algorithm, called Adaptive Gradient, or AdaGrad. Instead of a fixed learning rate, the learning rate adjusts, much like people do in real life. I love how machine learning algorithms reflect human learning! There's also AdaFactor, AdaDelta, AdaBoost, AdaNet, etc.