User:LVIzo/sandbox

= Ya Xu = Ya Xu is a Statistician and Senior Staff Applied Research Engineer, currently working for LinkedIn. Over the past 5 years, she has been working to create a “world-class A/B testing platform” to expand across social media sites. A/B testing is control group versus treatment group software testing. Xu and her research epitomize the progression of networking in the age dominated by the Internet, and are representative of the undermined service women provide in STEM fields.

Early Years and Education
In 1984, Xu was born in Sichuan, China. She spent all of her eighteen years growing up there until she decided to pursue higher education abroad.

Xu attended Williams College from 2002-2006 where she earned her B.A. in Mathematics and Economics. In the school year of 2004-2005, her junior year, Xu participated in the 1-year Dean’s Exchange Student program partnered with California Institute of Technology. From 2006-2010, Xu then went on to earn her Ph.D. in Statistics from Stanford University.

Career
In the summer of 2008, Xu scored an internship with Google while still working on her Ph.D. The following summer she landed a job with the Microsoft Corporation (July 2010 - September 2011) as an Applied Researcher, where she used acquired knowledge for further scientific inquiry in their Software Engineering department. In two months’ time, she moved up to the position of Senior Applied Researcher. In April of 2013 she left Microsoft to work with the company LinkedIn in Mountain View, California as a Staff Applied Researcher and Engineer, where she applied management, design, and technical skills to create and execute new products and systems. In May of this year, 2015, she once again moved up in the company to Senior Staff Applied Researcher and Engineer, which is the position she holds currently.

Personal Life
All the while, Xu does have a life outside of work and research. She enjoys yoga, running, squash, and tennis. She also likes pingpong and badminton, but does not get to play very often. Other hobbies include outdoor activities such as jogging, hiking, or sitting on the beach.

Ya Xu married Thomas Williams on March 31, 2006, months before pursuing her doctoral degree. Not too long after, the two had two children, just as Xu was moving up in the professional ranks.

Research
In all of her co-authored papers, she explains and outlines her research into A/B testing. A/B testing is a type of software testing that involves taking two site or page groups, one experimental and one control, applying an independent variable (which could be anything from a color scheme to placement of an advertisement), and then extrapolating data from the users’ behavior on each of the sites. Her research focuses on investigating OEC (Overall Evaluation Criterion), click tracking software, such as advertisement tracking, initial effects, which describe how early experimental phases of an experiment affect the rest of the experiment, and carryover effects, which, like initial effects, describe how the users are effected by a first testing trial who then go on to a second testing trial. In Xu’s studies, she and her colleagues concluded an experiment with heightened sensitivity would be one with a shorter duration and a smaller population. Those two aspects contribute to the increase in preciseness of an experiment. Moreover, sensitivity leads to more experiments, which in turn paves the way for large scale experimentation.

Controversy
Neither the names Linkedin nor Ya Xu are or have been in the heat of controversy, however the work Xu does for Linkedin is.

In 2014, a data researcher for Facebook published results from an experiment on 689,003 users testing if positive versus negative sentiment posts would affect the user’s emotions. However, the results showed experimental groups were effected by a minuscule amount, but users were effected nonetheless.

News media has latched onto this development and journalists are on their way to shaping the public’s opinion that this science and experimentation are harmful and are violations against the general public. To quote:

“We assign false value to the A before us, never imagining the possibly preferable B that was never tried. As the psychologist Daniel Kahneman has pointed out, it is human nature to assume that ‘what you see is all there is.’”

-Alain Pilon, The New York Times

“We are almost all part of experiments they quietly run to see if different versions with little changes make us use more, visit more, click more, or buy more.”

-Josh Constine, TechCrunch