Alan Qi is the vice president and chief data scientist of Ant Financial, where he leads the AI department that is helping build machine learning and deep learning platforms (including search and recommendation engines) and works with various business units to develop analytical and predictive solutions. Previously, he was a tenured associate professor in CS and statistics at Purdue University. Alan is an associate editor of JMLR and served as area chair of ICML. He received the A. Richard Newton Breakthrough Research Award and NSF Career award in 2011. Alan holds a PhD from MIT.