Dr. Kiana Wang is a Principal Data Scientist/Associate Director at AT&T. Before joining AT&T, she was a Data Scientist/Manager at Warner Bros. Discovery, Xandr and Elevate. She has a PhD degree in Agricultural Engineering from Iowa State University, 3 Master degrees in Cell Biology, Statistics, Computer Science from Chinese Academy of Sciences, Iowa State University and Georgia Tech.
Kiana is interested in machine learning, recommender system, graph theory, statistics, visualization of high dimensional data and building financial scorecards. Her publications could be found on Google Scholar.
My name is Qi Wang. Most of my American friends and colleagues kept pronouncing my first name as "Key", so I gave up and chose the English name Kiana. My older son's name is "Max" which stands for Maximum and my younger son's name is of course "Min" because it stands for Minimum. From the name , you could imagine I am done with 2 kids, so there will not be any "Mean" or "Median" people in my family. Also from the name, it seems I am doing some work related to Data. Congratulations, you are right. I work as a Data Scientist after PhD graduation. For example, at Warner Bros. Discovery, I worked on viewership data which record what, when and where you watch live TV and on-demand videos. As a data scientist, I can predict what TV series or movies you like most and what you may watch next. This is very important for my company since it can make profit by content recommendation and TV advertisement.
In Addition to 1 PhD, 2 sons, I also have 3 Master degrees in Cell Biology, Statistics and Computer Science, respectively. Yes, I am a degree collector, I got my 3rd Master in Computer Science from Georgia Tech in 2020 while working and having my 2nd son just because it was paid by my company. Now you know I am a cheap nerd and a boring person. Like most people, I finished all degrees but not quitting in the middle like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Lady Gaga. I got married just once at the age when everybody thought I should. I have 2 kids like most married Chinese do in the US.
For the fun part, it is oxymoron. I am a foodie but I do not like to cook by myself. I like challenges but act super calm when I finally reach my goals. I finish my work very quickly and efficiently but do not want to look back. I am not lazy just usually on energy saving mode. I like being quiet but works well in noisy environment. I am a super organized person but quite forgetful which keeps me young. I still act like a big baby sometimes although I am a mom of 2 kids. I love watching romantic dramas although I always think of myself as a self-rescue princess. I know it is silly and non-sense but I need it to empty my mind.