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Victor Hu
Next Big Sound
Victor Hu is the Chief Data Scientist at Next Big Sound, an online music industry
platform that tracks artist popularity and profitability and fan behavior across social
media, radio, and traditional sales channels as reported at a granular level by record
labels. Next Big Sound currently follows hundreds of thousands of artists across
more than thirty Internet and social media platforms, assessing current popular-
ity and future trajectory. Reaching that dual assessment is not an easy task. The
growth and fragmentation of music audience communities, the increased speed and
immediacy with which fans engage with artists via social media, and the intricacies
of sales channel data all pose challenges in terms of how to model missing data,
how to solve named entity recognition, and how to ensure accuracy in predicting
burgeoning talent.
Hu's career before joining Next Big Sound encompassed work for the US Department
of Defense, actuarial consulting at Milliman, and statistical analysis for the New York
Yankees. While still at Harvard, Hu sent his résumé and baseball analysis unso-
licited to the Yankees, and they swiftly picked him up. His work for the Yankees
was featured by Sports Illustrated , which named him one of their “25 under 25,”
and New York Magazine . Hu's subsequent work leveraging social media to predict
music trends and artists' sales has been featured in Forbes , South by Southwest,
and elsewhere. Hu holds an MS in Statistics and a BS in Applied Mathematics from
Harvard University.
Hu demonstrates how a data scientist can apply math and statistics skills across
fields as diverse as sports, actuarial finance, defense, and music. The freedom to
pursue a broad set of interests and dreams is the backdrop to Hu's remarks about
how the intelligent application of data can benefit every industry, how he chooses
which projects to work on, and the importance of cooperating, collaborating, and
establishing coalitions with the people who use his work, to make sure he has a
lasting impact. Hu's belief in the power of data science to transform even the most
traditional industries perfuses his interview.
 
 
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