Hola!

You have landed on the personal website of Yi Zhang, an researcher at the intersection of decision-making, machine learning, and stochastic modeling, working on utilizing learning & optimization tools to revolutionize the way we understand the world and create tangible impacts. On the applied side, I am interested in healthcare operations management, revenue management, and AI for science.


Currently I am a first-year master student majoring in Management Science & Engineering @ Tsinghua and Operations Research @ Columbia. I am extremely fortunate to be advised by Cheng Hua , and to work closely with Prof. Elynn Chen, Prof. Xi Chen, Prof. Stefanus Jasin and Prof. Yue Hu.

- About Me

Education Background

  • Sep 2025 – Jun 2026 (expected)

    Columbia University, Fu Foundation School of Engineering

    -New York, USA
    -M.S. in Operations Research

    Tsinghua-Columbia Dual Master’s Degree in Business Analytics

  • Sep 2024 – Jun 2026(expected)

    Tsinghua University, School of Economics and Management

    -Beijing, China
    -M.S. in Business Analytics

    Courses: Stochastic Process (PhD level), Convex Optimization (PhD level), Advanced Operations Research (PhD level), Data Analytics: Inference and Decision Making, Advanced Econometrics, Advanced Machine Learning (PhD level)

  • Sep 2020 – Jun 2024

    Tongji University, School of Economics and Management

    -Shanghai, China
    -B.S. in Management Information System

    GPA:4.92/5 (Rank: Top 1%, Graduation with the Highest Honor)

    Courses: Calculus, Discrete mathematics, Linear Algebra, Probability Theory, Applied Statistics, Data Structure, Data Science, Business Modeling and Simulation, Database Technology (All A+)

Research Interest

  • My research interests lie at the intersection of adaptive sequential decision-making, stochastic modeling and Bayesian non-parametric model, especially Gaussian process, with applications in healthcare delivery, AI for science and service operations management. These fields hold immense societal significance, offering the potential to revolutionize the way we understand and solve critical challenges. I'm dedicated to taking the power I have been given and use it for this meaning cause, aspiring to leave this world better than I found it.
    --"What's important in life?"
    --"To improve the human condition; to positively affect the lives of people, especially young people; and to increase the human understanding of how the world works."

Professional Experience

  • Jul 2023 – Nov 2023

    Bosch, Corporate Research

    -Shanghai, China
    -Data Scientist Intern

    Build a LSTM network to predict cross-selling probability by purchasing sequence. (Patents Pending)
    Use SQL to fetch data and PowerBI to perform visualization; Use Jingdong Shufang to review sales performance.

  • Jan 2023 – Mar 2023

    SAP, Data Intelligence Office

    -Shanghai, China
    -Data Modeling and Predictive Analysis Intern

    Develop a tool to monitor the backstage data loading process and analyze the error information.
    Write 6 technical docs about development work; responsible for ticket processing; assist scrum master in project planning

  • July 2022 – Sept. 2022

    Deloitte, Risk Consulting Department

    -Chongqing, China
    -Quant Researcher Assistant

    Use OCR and Python to capture government’s financial data; check data reliability by government budget equation.
    Participate in the construction of factors like government fiscal impact, and city primacy to enrich the factor pool.

Honors & Awards

  • Graduation with the Highest Honor: Outstanding Undergraduate of Shanghai

    2024

    National Scholarship (Top 0.2% scholarship from Ministry of Education of China)

    2021 & 2022

    Rongfang Shen Scholarship (Top 1% in Tongji University)

    2021

Recent Updates

  • June 2024: Graduate from Tongji University and is awarded Excellent Graduate of Class 2024. Highest honor for undergraduates in Shanghai! May. 2024: We will give a talk at Development of Management Science and Engineering Forum at Antai College of Economics and Management, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Dec. 2023: We will give a talk about our work at pre-ICIS HCI research workshop. See you there! May 2023: Our paper "When Online Auction Meets Virtual Reality: An Empirical Investigation" has been accepted by SIGHCI 2023 Proceeding. A good start of my academic journey! Oct. 2022: Honored to be awarded the National Scholarship again! Oct. 2021: Honored to be awarded the National Scholarship. Highest academic honor from Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China! June 2021: Big decision! Switching my major from Architecture and Urban Planning to Management Information System.

Publications

Working Papers

Work in Progress

  • Learning Logit-Based Arrivals for Resource Allocation in Contextual Queues

    -- with Prof. Yue Hu

    Investigating contextual queueing systems with logit-based arrival processes, aiming to capture customer heterogeneity and context-dependent arrival behaviors.

    Conducted an extensive literature review on queueing control, contextual bandits, and logit demand models to identify theoretical gaps and practical challenges.

    Formulated the research problem as learning and optimizing resource allocation under contextual arrivals, and outlined an initial algorithmic framework for sequential decision-making.

  • LLM-based Automatic Heuristic Design for Inventory Management

    -- with Prof. Stefanus Jasin

    Implement a LLM-driven inventory policy generation instance using Evolution of Heuristics by leveraging base stock, capped base stock, and constant order policies as initial strategies.

    Challenge the conventional wisdom which uniformly favors reflection by rigorously designing and testing 4 novel reflection types, and reveal how traditional reflection may inadvertently reinforce suboptimal policie.

    Pioneer the first integration of external optimizer with LLM-generated codes by developing an automated pipeline that extracts and optimize tunable parameters, and reintegrates enhanced parameters back into the policy structure, achieving SOTA performance compared to existing baselines.

  • Transfer Learning for Joint Assortment and Pricing Decisions

    -- with Prof. Xi Chen, Prof. Elynn Chen

    Developed a Transfer Joint Assortment–Pricing framework that leverages multi-market source data to improve real-time assortment and pricing decisions in the target market.

    Designed an aggregate-then-debias estimator, combining pooled-source MLE with target-market LASSO correction, and established high-probability confidence bounds.

    Derived tight regret upper bounds, showing that transfer reduces estimation variance by a factor of number of sources while controlling bias via sparsity, outperforming non-transfer benchmarks.

    Conducted extensive simulations across heterogeneous markets, demonstrating improvements in revenue, pricing accuracy, and sample efficiency.

  • Mixed Alpha Stable Kernels for Bayesian Optimization

    -- with Prof. Cheng Hua

    Developed a Mixed Fixed Alpha Stable Kernel that integrates components with different stability parameters to generalize beyond Gaussian and Cauchy spectral mixture kernels.

    Designed empirical spectrum–based initialization with fixed sampling interval to stabilize frequency estimation, improving kernel parameter learning compared to naive heuristics.

    Demonstrated that mixed-α configurations outperform standard kernels on high-dimensional benchmark.