Affiliation
Chancellor’s Professor, Department of Statistics, University California at Irvine

Education
PhD, Statistics, The Pennsylvania State University
MS, Operations Research, University of Montana
BS, Computational Mathematics, Fudan University

Annie Qu grew up in a suburb of Shanghai, never traveling beyond the city before she turned 16, so her fantasy was to travel to many far-off places.

Qu started to learn statistics when she was majoring in the operations research master’s program at the University of Montana. She was learning S-PLUS (the early commercial version of R) in the early 90s and taking a multivariate statistics course from an Indian professor who she liked. She was trained as a computational mathematician and had never analyzed data before. Suddenly, all the numbers and programming were meaningful and there were interesting stories behind them. She was always curious about science discoveries, so she was pleased to find a field in which she could use her skills to explore her curiosity about the world.

Around 2013, Qu became interested in unstructured data such as text data and began developing recommender systems to solve the “cold start” problem. She and her students struggled for some time to improve their method. It turned out the simulation data setting does not match the reality in which missing data is highly informative and nonuniform. Once they figured that out, they had a breakthrough.

That was just the beginning of their journey in data science research, however. Later, they also began to work on tensor learning for optical breast cancer imaging data, network data, deep learning, active learning, crowdsourcing, and personalized medicine. Doing something new and cutting-edge always excites Qu and keeps her motivated.

Qu’s proudest moments have been when her students transform and achieve after years of struggle and hard work—when they become more confident, get their dream jobs, and publish their own papers. Her proudest moment this year was when she received a thank-you email from a female nonstatistics major minority student taking her Zoom class in linear modeling: