Ling Cheng

Director of AI / ML - Generative AI Lead

2022 - 2024

Quizlet is a top consumer learning platform with 50M+ monthly active users, including over two thirds of U.S. high school students and half of U.S. college students. - Spearheaded our direction into building generative AI-powered products in 2023: initiated Notes-to-Set, which converted students’ notes into flashcards (evolved to Magic Notes, with 5M+ uploads); and led the launch and creation of Q-Chat, an AI tutor grounded on students’ study material, with 5M+ conversations. These had great student feedback with average ratings of 4.5/5 stars. - Led our cross-functional AI innovation team: launched Essay Starter, which used only questions to guide students to an essay outline, and Brain Beats, which converted students’ material to fun songs. - Partnered closely with Legal and Trust & Safety to develop guardrails and extra moderation. For my leadership, I was recognized in the Business Insider Top 100 in AI and Top 6 in AI for Edtech from Quizlet's recommendation

Director of AI / ML - Head of ML

2020 - 2022

- Led ML and research across the company, championing algorithm and learning science-driven innovation. This included strategy & roadmaps, closely collaborating with PMs and Engineering. Team built 30+ models. - Developed NLP models to enrich question interactions, including ML-generated MCQs, and semantic text grading (first in the market). Together with a new paywall and premium differentiation, this led to 4x growth in subscriptions revenue during my time there. - Advised on all ML stages from creating training data, to feature ideation, model selection & testing, engineering implementation, evaluations, and product integration. - Made critical trade-off decisions around model quality, latency, cost, transparency, and complexity. - Guided ML infrastructure decisions, and helped form the ML Platform team. - People management: Grew team from two to eleven, with the highest retaining team (five hired now at 4+ years). Received excellent feedback, and grew reports up to manager and principal levels. - Launch partner for OpenAI’s GPT-3 (2020), which involved exploration of educational use cases. - Led 15+ well-attended ML workshops over the years, targeted to various groups including engineering, analysts, product, and executive leadership.

Sr Manager, Data Science / Machine Learning

2018 - 2020

Sr Manager, Data Science / Machine Learning

2017 - 2018

Lead machine learning for job search, recommendations, email, and salary estimates

Lead Data Scientist

2015 - 2017

Senior Data Scientist

2014 - 2015

Live projects include: - Content auto-moderation algorithm using text features and machine learning models - Classifier of eclectic job titles to Glassdoor occupations - Job Explorer to visualize job opportunities and career progressions, presented at the White House

Data Science Consultant

2013 - 2014

Data Scientist / Co-Founder

2013 - 2013

- Developed site to collect and display sustainability practices of businesses - Won second place at the Business for Social Responsibility Hackathon - At the time, I was one of two full-time co-founders, and left before the start-up was funded

Sr Business Analyst/Data Scientist

2010 - 2013