SMU School of Information Systems alumnus Thia Kai Xin was featured in an article where he shared his experiences as a data scientist at Alibaba-backed ecommerce platform, Lazada and how it all started. Better known as the co-founder of DataScience SG, Mr Thia 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. He 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.
Mr Thia 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 said. He also shared his views on the data science field in Southeast Asia and offered some advice to future data scientists.