Scholar
Alex(Shaojie) Deng
Google Scholar ID: lRHv-7kAAAAJ
Airbnb
Citations & Impact
Citations
1,498
H-index
17
i10-index
20
Publications
20
Co-authors
8
list available
Contact
Publications
Browse publications on Google Scholar (top-right) ↗
Resume (English only)
Academic Achievements
- Published multiple papers, including 'Harnessing the Power of Interleaving and Counterfactual Evaluation for Airbnb Search Ranking' (KDD 2025), 'Transforming Location Retrieval at Airbnb: A Journey from Heuristics to Reinforcement Learning' (CIKM 2024), 'Metric Decomposition in A/B Tests' (KDD 2024), and more.
Research Experience
- Served as Technical Director of Platform Data Science and Machine Learning at Airbnb from 2020 to July 2024, chairing the science track of the company-wide AI & ML Council. Work spanned modernizing applied research workflows, developing a collaborative ML prototyping ecosystem, building foundational data infrastructure for event stream analytics and behavioral modeling, and advancing agile experimentation frameworks for offline and online model evaluation. Earlier, part of Microsoft’s Cloud & AI Platform, contributing to both the Microsoft Analysis and Experimentation Team and Azure Machine Learning. Led methodological and engineering improvements to one of the industry’s largest online experimentation platforms, with work spanning causal inference, Bayesian optimization, reinforcement learning, AutoML, recommender systems, high-throughput distributed systems, and analytics infrastructure.
Education
- Earned a Ph.D. in Statistics from Stanford University in 2010, under the supervision of Prof. Tze Lai.
Background
- Heading the engineering and science for Responsible AI in Microsoft’s Core AI division. The platform safeguards hundreds of billions of generative AI interactions annually, providing foundational safety systems for nearly all Azure OpenAI API traffic. This includes multimodal content moderation, jailbreak prevention, cross-domain prompt injection protection (XPIA), hallucination detection, and protected material identification. At the forefront of safety evaluation, red teaming, model steering, and establishing the trust and security foundations for agentic AI systems.
Miscellany
- Describes himself as a researcher/hacker.
