Alvin Yu has over twelve years of professional experience in data science and consulting in text analytics. Yu graduated from the University of Michigan with his master’s degree in Statistics. Other than having a strong educational background, Yu gained considerable experience in analyzing unstructured data when he worked for text mining software company, Megaputer Intelligence. He performed text analysis and offered consulting for companies in different industries such as banking, accounting, marketing, internal audit as well as insurance. He also trained analysts from these companies to perform data and text analytics with Megaputer’s PolyAnalyst.

In 2015, Yu joined State Farm in Atlanta and worked as a principal data analyst in the Applied Analytics and Research Team (AART), assisting the IT department to make data-driven business decision. In AART, he continued to mentor others with his text analytics skills, and at the same time, learned to program in Python. He started translating text analytics capabilities from PolyAnalyst into Python. One of the notable efforts was the analysis of data usage. He developed a program in Python to parse SQL statements. The program was later translated to PySpark to enable Big Data analytics. The result of this effort helped business partners gain knowledge down to the table and column level of data usage in State Farm’s data warehouse, and make better decision in data movement from existing databases to Hadoop. His hard work and knowledge in text analytics also contribute to the implementation of the Workgroup Recommendation System in HP Service Manager in June, 2016. The system utilizes structured data as well as text data within IT Service Tickets to recommend workgroup for IT Support Staff to resolve tickets faster with the correct workgroup, saving State Farm more than 1 million dollars a year.

Yu was promoted to become a data scientist in 2018 and joined the Natural Language Processing Center of Excellence (NLP CoE) to continue to build data science solution for the enterprise, consult and mentor others in NLP techniques, developing new NLP toolings as well as evaluating state-of-the-art toolings and algorithms. He has been fortunate to be in great teams for State Farm organized Hack Day events and is a five-time winner in his seven years of State Farm career.

He is good at Python, RegEx, Text Analytics, PolyAnalyst, and Music! Yu also obtained a master’s degree in music theory from the Indiana University. In his spare time, he loves to compose music and play music with others. Please see his music biography for more details.