Engineering The Future of AI: Meet Dr. Haopeng Zhang
“AI is reshaping the whole scope of data science.”
By Amari Andrews
Before stepping into the world of Data Science, Dr. Haopeng Zhang was initially interested in electrical engineering. Growing up with two parents that were engineers, he knew that when it was time to pick up an undergraduate study subject, engineering was the way to go.
“At the time, it [electrical engineering] sounded really cool to me. So I picked electrical engineering as my undergraduate major. I was mostly studying power electronics and power grid.”
During his Ph.D studies at UC Davis, Dr. Zhang’s topic of interest shifted from electrical engineering to Computer Science where his main focus was AI, specifically Natural Language Processing and large language models (LLM’s).
Prior to becoming a Niner, Dr. Zhang was previously an Assistant Professor at The University of Hawai’i at Manoa. During this position, he created the “ALOHA” ( Advanced Language Processing and Human Analytics) lab, which is his very own research lab where he, his PhD students, and other masters and undergraduate students that he supervises combine their research with interdisciplinary applications.
“I not only work on how to build better language models or how to better use language models, but I also focus on the application of the AI models. For example, I work a lot in healthcare, where I try to use AI to try to understand and predict health-related outcomes, and I also work a lot in linguistics where I use AI to protect endangered languages.”
Dr. Zhang sees AI as a positive impact to data science, and believes that AI and natural language processing is a very big component to data science.
“To me, data science is how people gather data, process and analyze it to get some insight from the data. AI has been playing an important role in the whole pipeline. I’ll say AI is reshaping the whole scope of data science. It can assist humans to perform different analyses of data and it also automates the process of data analytics and processing it more efficiently.”
Since Dr. Zhang is still new to UNC Charlotte, he is looking to expand his “ALOHA” research lab. For undergraduate and graduate students interested in AI in data science and LLM’s, please feel free to reach out Dr. Zhang @haopeng.zhang@charlotte.edu.