Colloquia / Seminars / Industry Talks

Data science has been a buzzword in both academia and industry. In this talk, we will explore the roles of data science at Samsung Pay and demonstrate its power via a case study on user growth. Acquiring, engaging and retaining users via data-driven approaches have been playing an increasingly important role in Samsung Pay’s success. We will present the key factors of boosting Samsung Pay user base in the context of a funnel model. We briefly introduce our efforts corresponding to these key factors and focus on how to retain active users. We show how to combine retention/cohort analysis and machine learning techniques to identify the users with high lifetime value and high probability of churn for targeted retention promotion campaigns.

Rui leads the data science team of Samsung Pay US, which develops a wide range of data solutions for the world’s most widely accepted mobile payment service. He has published nearly 40 papers in top venues on databases and data mining, including VLDB, VLDBJ, TKDE, ICDE, SIGKDD, ICDM, SDM, and CIKM. Prior to his post at Samsung, he was a research assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Hong Kong Baptist University and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia. He was the recipient of CIKM 2015 Best Paper Runner Up and the Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship issued by Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).