Uploaded June 2022 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Susan Shu Chang is a principal data scientist at clearco, helping ecommerce founders' by building machine learning-powered investing. In her previous role, she developed the company’s very first ML powered website recommender system, deployed to millions of customers, and created a custom OpenAI Gym environment for a reinforcement learning project in production. She is also the founder and developer of Quill Game Studios, selling ~10k copies of the debut game in 6 months. She has given talks at PyCon Canada,Toronto Machine Learning Summit (TMLS), and more. She writes about her career journey and learning on susanshu.com/. If you like the show subscribe to the channel and give us a 5-star review. Subscribe to Daliana's newsletter on dalianaliu.com for more on data science.
Daliana's LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/dalianaliu
Daliana's Twitter: twitter.com/DalianaLiu
0:00 Intro
00:01:29 how she changed from economics to econometrics and finally to data science
00:07:23 what reinforcement learning is doing
00:15:58 how to find the right rewards
00:20:00 recent reinforcement learning use cases
00:27:28 how to add reinforcement learning to social media recommender system
00:44:42 how to assess cannibalization effect
00:48:24 how to tell if people use the model you build
01:04:42 common mistakes people make when putting models in production
01:08:30 her day-to-day as a principal data scientist
01:14:05 what productivity really means
01:21:04 a few things she wanted the listeners to know about productivity
01:41:48 books and blogs she recommended about productivity
Susan Shu Chang is a principal data scientist at clearco, helping ecommerce founders' by building machine learning-powered investing. In her previous role, she developed the company’s very first ML powered website recommender system, deployed to millions of customers, and created a custom OpenAI Gym environment for a reinforcement learning project in production. She is also the founder and developer of Quill Game Studios, selling ~10k copies of the debut game in 6 months. She has given talks at PyCon Canada,Toronto Machine Learning Summit (TMLS), and more. She writes about her career journey and learning on susanshu.com/. If you like the show subscribe to the channel and give us a 5-star review. Subscribe to Daliana's newsletter on dalianaliu.com for more on data science.
Daliana's LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/dalianaliu
Daliana's Twitter: twitter.com/DalianaLiu
0:00 Intro
00:01:29 how she changed from economics to econometrics and finally to data science
00:07:23 what reinforcement learning is doing
00:15:58 how to find the right rewards
00:20:00 recent reinforcement learning use cases
00:27:28 how to add reinforcement learning to social media recommender system
00:44:42 how to assess cannibalization effect
00:48:24 how to tell if people use the model you build
01:04:42 common mistakes people make when putting models in production
01:08:30 her day-to-day as a principal data scientist
01:14:05 what productivity really means
01:21:04 a few things she wanted the listeners to know about productivity
01:41:48 books and blogs she recommended about productivity
