curriculum vitae

General Information

Full Name Zhitong "Klara" Guan
Contact klaraztguan [at] ust [dot] hk
Languages English, Mandarin, French

Research Areas

  • My research focuses on advancing Human-Computer Interaction.
  • I seek to investigate the impact of digital technology on human experience and design interactive and generalizable systems with an emphasis on inclusivity and human self-improving.

Education

  • 2020 - 2021
    UC Berkeley – Master of Engineering in IEOR
    • Advised by Prof. Zeyu Zheng
    • GPA: 4.0 (4.0 scale)
    • Capstone Project: Design Specialized Machine Learning Tools for Customer Reviews and Operational Decision Making
  • 2016 - 2020
    UC Berkeley - Bachelor of Arts in Math and Data Science
    • Graduated with Honors
    • GPA: 3.8 (4.0 scale)

Work Experience

  • 2022 - now
    Research Associate at APEX Group of HKUST
    • Accessibility technology/digital well-being researcher under Prof. Mingming Fan.
    • Developed a mobile application system, FetchAid, that utilizes deep learning and augmented reality to guide BLV users in parcel locker touchscreen interaction and precise target localization.
    • Currently studying digital technologies for meditation and mental health.
  • 2021 - 2022
    Product Manager at the WeChat Group, Tencent
    • Managed 6 full stack product development pipelines, viz. Discovering user needs, market investigation, product design (e.g.,tag helper, toolbarand Channels), R&D, online experiment, revision and launch.
    • Proposed corresponding design considerations, functionalities and search rank strategies to meet users demands and cooperated with the frontend, backend and algorithm teams for the product prototypes.
    • Solved emergencies concerned with functionality, data privacy, and security.
  • Summer 2020
    Data Scientist Intern at Microsoft
    • Created a prediction model for automotive failure from user complaints and achieved 90% accuracy, 95% precision, and 92% recall.
    • Solved the problem of automotive self‐identification failure by designing NLP tools based on XGBoost and TextCNN.
  • Summer 2019
    Actuarial Intern at Delta Dental
    • Analyzed cost factors (e.g. age and group size) by conducting data mining with Python, SQL, and Excel and visualization tools (Seaborn, Matplotlib).
    • Assisted in the pricing process and decreased total loss by 2.5%.
    • Developed for the sales team an intelligent slide deck to automatically extract data, create charts and compile standardized Power‐Point slides using VBA and SQL extensions, and the total working time was reduced from a month to 3 days.