Shirui (Olivia) Zhou

Email: sz614@georgetown.edu | Phone: 571-444-9537
GitHub: Oliz888 | Website: Personal Website | Linkedin: Profile Link

Summary

A dedicated researcher with expertise in data science, economics, and public policy, aiming to advance computational social science through complex system analysis, network modeling, and the design of deliberation platforms.

Education

M.S. in Data Science for Public Policy
Georgetown University, GPA: 3.87/4.00 (Expected May 2024)

  • Coursework: Supervised and Unsupervised Machine Learning, Social Network Analysis, Big Data, Data Visualization, Comparative Public Policy.

B.S. in Economics
University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China, GPA: 3.84/4.00 (First Class, July 2022)

  • Dissertation: Can Remittances Compensate for Parental Absence in Left-Behind Children?

Working Papers

  1. Network Analysis of Opinion Leaders: A Case Study of the 2019 Hong Kong Protests (In Preparation, 2024)
  2. Consensus Through Innovative Voting Mechanisms Using the Pol.is Platform (In Preparation, 2024)
  3. Quantifying Lyrics and Emotional Responses Using NLP and Clustering Techniques (In Preparation, 2024)
  4. European Attitudes on Universal Basic Income AI-Driven Unemployment Shocks (In Preparation, 2024)

Projects

Network Analysis of Opinion Leaders

  • Performed sentiment analysis on 255,000 tweets using NLTK and Word2Vec.
  • Conducted social network analysis to detect community structures with Gephi.

Visualizing Consensus Dynamics on Pol.is

  • Applied PCA, UMAP, and K-means clustering to analyze voting behavior.
  • Conducted time-series analysis to examine polarization and consensus formation.

Cryptocurrency Sentiment Analysis

  • Developed an NLP pipeline using AWS SparkML to analyze 6M+ rows of Reddit comments.
  • Applied LSTM and ARIMA models to forecast cryptocurrency price fluctuations.

Music Recommendation Engine

  • Built a recommendation engine using Word2Vec and clustering techniques.
  • Deployed a multi-page interactive website with Streamlit.

Work Experience

Information Technology Engineer
Taurus Industrial Group, Port Lavaca, TX (Nov 2024 - Present)

Data Scientist Consultant
The World Bank, Washington, DC (Mar 2024 - Nov 2024)

Data Analyst Intern
Ashoka Innovators for the Public, Arlington, VA (May 2023 - Sep 2023)

Media Analyst Intern
Matters Lab, Dali, China (May 2022 - Sep 2022)

Research Assistant
Intellisia Institute, Guangzhou, China (May 2021 - Sep 2021)

Teaching Experience

Teaching Assistant
McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown University (Aug 2023 - Present)

  • Courses: Data Science Foundations, Accelerated Statistics, Accelerated Microeconomics.

Skills

  • Programming: Python, R, STATA, MATLAB, TensorFlow, PyTorch.
  • Big Data: AWS, Spark, Hadoop, MongoDB.
  • Machine Learning: XGBoost, NLP, PCA, SVM, Clustering.
  • Visualization: Matplotlib, Seaborn, Streamlit, Tableau, D3.js.

Research Interests

  • Network analysis, computational social science, decentralized governance, and opinion dynamics.