 Hello, I'm Michael North, and this is Asia Pacific Business Strategies. In this program, we try to identify the leaders for now and for the future of science and business and culture, based mainly here in Hawaii, but radiating out from this center of the Pacific to North America, to the West Coast, and to all of the U.S., and then to Asia. We try to find the connections and how they're typically made here in the nexus, which is Honolulu, Hawaii. So I want to welcome you to the global center here. We have a very interesting guest here from one of our local banks, and his name is Anthony Lei, and he has a title that to many people might seem a little opaque. He's a data analyst. Sounds really exciting, right? Sounds like being an accountant or something. But actually, I think that your profession is very interesting. It has a lot of impact on all of our lives in ways that we don't really understand. People have heard the term big data, right? And you deal in big data all the time, and in your job, you try to figure out how to use big data in a way to serve your clients in a more intelligent way, how to have foresight into their needs, how to fulfill their needs when they arise. Is that about correct? Have I got that right? Yes, definitely. First of all, thank you for having me. And as you mentioned, I would say big data is a buzzword, basically using data science and analytics to make a better decision for business. Yeah. So give me an example, like what have you been working on recently? So for example, in my educations, I'm taking classes online that train me to better perform at work in terms of machine learning and computer vision and so on and so forth. So what does the computer tell you that you don't already know? When you analyze the data, what can you learn from a big amount of data or a long series of data that you can't know just from your own self? So lots of time at work, at education, I deal with data in a very high dimension. So it is often helpful to visualize them. These are the best techniques that visualize data so that you can look at the data before you make any judgment. So people feel that they have an intuitive feel for how things are going and what you provide is an objective check on people's sense of what information means. I mean, one example that might be something that you would work on would be looking at all of the bank's customers and based on past patterns being able to anticipate which ones might be looking for an auto loan at a given time. And you can know or you can narrow down the likelihood based on past patterns of many people who have gotten auto loans and then you can look at all the current customers and say, okay, here's a thousand customers that we have that in the next year might be looking for auto loans. Is that sort of an example of what you might do with the data? Yeah, one of the traditional, I think that definitely could be one of the examples. One of the traditional examples that banking has been using for a long time is the so-called FICO score based on lots of attributes, information to understand the credit roughness of the customer. But that is basically how in general banks make credit decisions. Of course, big data has been in the news a fair amount recently and sometimes in not such a great way. We all know or we think that Google is watching us and Facebook is watching us and everything that we do online is being tracked and so on. And we know what happened with this company in New York, Cambridge Analytics that got involved with Facebook data and there was a big political uproar about how they used that information in ways that are questionable, ethically, you know. You talked to us a little bit about the ethics of banking and data and I know that's something that you think about. I think currently the internet sector, particularly as you mentioned Facebook and Google, is very interesting. So if you look at the company financials, the profit margin is very high. So one of the reasons I believe is that they're utilizing consumer data to do a lot of interesting stuff to improve the margin. With this scandal coming, you know, it happened, there may be regulations that if they decided to use consumer data in a certain way, you may need to pay for it. And that's actually a start-up that give consumer the power to be able to harness those, they're willing to, as a consumer, if you're willing to sell your data and he is the data for Google and Google, he is the monetary compensation for the consumer. So do you think it's important that the consumer has control over their data? Definitely. Yeah. So if you've been watching just in recent weeks since that political thing that we're talking about went through with Facebook, Facebook has been sending out messages and emails to all their subscribers saying, we've got new ways for you to control your security settings, the data, who you share it with, how and when and how confidential it is. I think it's a good idea to do a security audit if you're active on the internet, to do an audit from time to time about what you're showing to the world. But do you agree? Right. I definitely agree. I think that's a very light here. Let's say if you, for example, data means it could be an age for a customer and it could be also a derivative of this data. That means based on your activity, Facebook thinks you are a Democrat, let's say. Does that particular piece of data belongs to you or belongs to Facebook? So those are the interesting very lines that not only in terms of security, but those ownership of the data. So if you look at your data and you see, oh, I'm 35 years old and I'm a Democrat and I live in Columbus, Ohio, you might not want to share all three of those pieces of information together with Facebook because that could make you a target for people who are doing fundraising and coming at you with issues and so on. I think it's a really good idea for people to be sort of defensive about how they share their data. Is that correct? Right. I think to be fair, with all the media mentioned, Facebook actually taking measures to, as far as I have friends and workers there, they actually taking measures to step up the protection for consumer data. At the same time, we have to recognize that Facebook is a business. They employ thousands of people who earn good salaries all over the world, all different languages and so on. Their platform is very expensive to build and maintain and keep making it smarter and smarter and there are lots of benefits for us and we have to respect the fact that to some extent it's our data that allows them to generate the income that makes the Facebook platform or LinkedIn or YouTube or all these services that makes it possible. So it's kind of a balance, isn't it? Yeah, there's a balance between business logic and ethics and privacy that I find is a very interesting space. Definitely. So how do you deal with your own personal data on the internet? Do you show everybody everything? Well, I actually conservatively in terms of this space, I don't use Facebook as much as I used to be and I do check my security setting and so on and so forth. And that's also worth mentioning is that this generation, the millennials as well as the even younger generation, they tend to care less about the data privacy than the senior one. Why is that? My intuition tells me they just get used to it when they first have experience of all these technologies. So their social life as they're growing up, three, four years old, they're already using their phones. It's all based on what they share with their friends online. So their existence as social beings is partly the traditional, their kids running around in the playground playing, but they're also kids running around on the virtual playground in the whole world. And I know that there are kids in China who have friends in Bangladesh and Brazil and New York that they've never met and never will, but they will still be friends. So that could partly explain why they want to be more open with their data. They come from a sort of a sharing economy that is different from the economy that has been the normal economy for the last 6,000 years since there's been economy. What a big change. Isn't that amazing? Just over the last 10 or 15 years since social media started to emerge. And you're kind of in the middle of that wave, right? Yes. Yeah. You remember the old style, but you're well adapted to the new style. So you're at a very interesting place. I think you have what could be a really amazing future because you have a lot of, well, let's talk about your education, Georgia Tech and UH conventional schools, right? But also as a badge of your sort of half millennial status, you've done a lot of education virtual, right? You've used edX and Coursera to take courses that are they used as degree credit or professional development, how are they used? So most of the time I'm just looking for online education and training to further my education and experience and so on and so forth. That's the major objective. As well as trying to satisfy my curiosity as well, right? Yeah. Right. Yeah. But I know that the edX one, for example, was affiliated with UC Berkeley, right? So do you get a UCB credit for the course that you took? So I believe this online education performed is still sort of an initial stage. The one that I took is not accredited, but it does have a certification, right? Now some of the program, for example, in edX, I believe they have a so-called micromaster program that if you finish that particular program and if you apply for a particular college, those can serve as a legitimate credit. So that's actually evolving, improving in terms of potential for those certification. You had another Coursera course you did at Johns Hopkins. What was that course that you did? That is the data science specialization that comes with a list of course, right? That comes with how to clean and collect data, how do you visualize data, as well as how do you build model and how do you build data products that serve the needs? Right. So even if it's not formally accredited, your completion, your successful completion of a course like that can go on your resume, can go as a line on your resume. So for future employers, they will value that, that you took the initiative to take what is probably a pretty difficult course from Johns Hopkins. You would expect them to be pretty rigorous and detailed, right? There's some sleepless night. Yeah, really? So how would you compare? Is it better or not so good? How is it different from, say, going to the same class at UH? That is definitely different, right? There's many perspectives that can, you know, talk about it, but I guess we can… Yeah, let's take a quick break and we'll be back for a moment with Anthony Lei to talk more about education. Hey, Stan Energyman here on Think Tech Hawaii, and they won't let me do political commentary, so I'm stuck doing energy stuff, but I really like energy stuff, so I'm going to keep on doing it. So join me every Friday on Stan Energyman at lunchtime, at noon, on my lunch hour. We're going to talk about everything energy, especially if it begins with the word hydrogen. We're going to definitely be talking about it. We'll talk about how we can make Hawaii cleaner, how we can make the world a better place, just basically save the planet. Even Miss America can't even talk about stuff like that anymore. We got it nailed down here. So we'll see you on Friday at noon with Stan Energyman. Aloha. Aloha. I'm Dave Stevens, host of the Cyber Underground. This is where we discuss everything that relates to computers that just kind of scare you out of your mind. So come join us every week here on ThinkTechHawaii.com, 1 p.m. on Friday afternoons, and then you can go see all our episodes on YouTube. Just look up the Cyber Underground on YouTube. All our shows will show up, and please follow us. We're always giving you current, relevant information to protect you. Keepin' you safe. Aloha. We're back with Anthony Lay, and we're getting into a good rhythm here, Anthony. Let's talk about formal education, especially technical education. Compare the relative advantages and disadvantages of taking a course, let's say locally here at University of Hawaii, and taking essentially the same course through Johns Hopkins online with Coursera. What are the advantages and the trade-offs? Right. So those are totally, not totally different. There's definitely some differences. For online education, there's an advantage for being a low-cost. If you think of, you have a performance, then you can, with that online performance, you can serve 10,000, maybe a million students in the same performance. For traditional education in the classroom, there's a limited scale. Maybe 50 at a time. Right, exactly. So in a cost perspective, online education is definitely, you know, wins over traditional education, right? And it depends on the subject, right? For example, let's say computer science, right? You basically do work, and you get feedback from your mentor, and you can do exam online. Some of the subjects are gear, better works to work online, you know, perform, but some of them are not so good, like, it's better for traditional. So for example, if you're doing chemistry, you have to go to your lab, and at home, you just have limited equipment to perform lab, you know, experiment. You just have your kitchen. Right, right, right. So for example, like a master's degree in business administration, one of the important things in MBA is networking, right? So in terms of networking, it's a little bit limited in that sense for online education. So it definitely has its advantage and disadvantage for both online and, you know, traditional education. Do you think it would be a good idea for students to have a kind of a hybrid strategy where they enroll in a formal education and then complement it with electronic, with distance learning as well? Yeah, definitely. So nowadays, particularly, as you mentioned, technology, technology is always evolving, right? They always have a new programming language coming from the corner and, you know, it serves a particular purpose, then as working in the sector, you really have to keep up, right? And another perspective is that nowadays, there's ADEC or COSR, they have, I believe, ADEC have AP CARs, AP CARs they can take for university educations. So if you are a very motivated high school student, you actually can take some credit on those performance and eventually leave you up in, when you arrive in university. Oh, okay. Very, very different sort of strategy than the traditional one where you just check into a university, you're in your dorm, you follow the curriculum, you go to certain classes, you're done, you're out. Modern 21st century education is a lot different. Right. Okay, you wrote a piece of software that I found rather interesting. It has a very simple purpose, it is a very complex under the hood, I'm sure. Tell us about that and maybe we can bring up the first screen so you can talk about that. What are we looking at here, Anthony? Yeah, so basically it goes back to my education and my undergrad, I did my math as well as finance, so one of my interests is financial engineering as well as financing in general. So what you're seeing right here is really a comparison of the two performance of two stock or so-called security. So we've got Apple and we've got the S&P. Right, what you see AAPL is a ticker for Apple and SPY is the SP500EPF. So basically you can compare two particular stock within two given time slide. Right. So here we've got from the 1st of January 2015 to the 7th of, or the 1st of July 2018. So basically three and a half years. Then we zoom that out and show, okay, so here's the time series. And Apple is red and the S&P is black, right? I think it's opposite. Oh, the opposite? Apple is the black and red is- Oh, okay. Right, right, right. So what does this time series tell us? What does this graph tell us? Right, so basically you can see a very simple influence. You can basically tell individual stock is much more volatile than a single stock. But they're pretty highly correlated at sometimes, right? You can see through 2015 and 2016 they were moving up and down pretty much together. But more recently in the last year, year and a half, they've diverged somewhat from each other. So that teaches you something about the stage of growth that Apple is in with relative to the rest of the market. Exactly. Okay, let's have a look at the next graphic here. And in this one, we've got Apple compared to Amazon. Two stocks, two differently, different industries, but kind of in a similar stage of growth, right? And they're both cyberspace stocks and we've still got the same time series. So let's zoom out and see what this tells us. Give us a comment on the red and the black here. Yeah. As you can see, Amazon is really outperforming the rest of the market. So there's an analysis done by some... Outperforming Apple. Yeah. And I think a loss of lately performance of S&P 500 contributed from four particular companies and Amazon is definitely one of them. Right. Actually, if you take Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook, the Fang stocks, then you have a really large segment of the high-tech market. What are the lines in the bottom below there? Is that volume? Yeah. That basically tells you the volatility of the financial security, as well as the bottom one. It tells you the drawdown, meaning from the last peak, how much did it go down? It gives you a sense of what is the bottom, right? Right. Okay. Let's zoom back out again. We've got another one to look at here. And in this example, we're comparing IBM, big, old-time American tech stock, right? 120 years old company, and MSCI, which is an index of emerging nation's stocks, right? And China was recently added to the MSCI that the A shares of much of China's securities industries were recently added to the MSCI. And we've got the same three-and-a-half-year timescape. Let's zoom back and see what this tells us. What do we see here, Anthony? Yeah. Definitely. And emerging market is, you know, having outperformed IBM. Yeah. Yeah. There's almost no place at which you would have been better holding IBM than invested in the MSCI. Right? Right. The MSCI, you can see, has a little more volatility to it. IBM is fairly steady, although there were some pretty steep declines that IBM had. But recently, IBM has consolidated its position. They formed a bottom, as they like to say in the markets. Right. And they're very hard on the cloud technology. Yeah. And they're doing well in cloud technology. Yeah. Okay. I think we have one more. Let's zoom back again. And I think with this one, we left the stocks the same, but we made it only for one year. So we could zoom in just, so we just looked at three-and-a-half years. Now we look at just a one year. So you're going to see more ups and downs. And you can analyze the correlation in terms of recent performance. So you wrote this for your own education in the middle of the night when you had nothing else to do? Yeah. I use mostly compared different ETFs. Right. Oh. Because often times... Exchange traded funds. Right. Right. Right. So oftentimes with S&P 500, you have different three, four different ETFs. So as a savvy investor, you want to invest in better performance as well as a lower cost. And this particular tool really gives me an understanding or the data visualization on... Once you look at it, which ETF is a little bit better choice? So you looked out and you didn't really find anything in the market that was able to tell you that. And so you wrote your own? Yes. I think I believe Google recently wrote out a very similar software. But at the time when I created it, there was a no. Yeah. And it must be Java under the hood because it recalculates instantly as you change the variables. Yes. It's a very similar programming language called RL. Okay. Yeah. Very good. Well, so Anthony, a little bit about you personally. Your last name is Lei, but that doesn't mean Lei like in flower Lei. That is a Chinese name and you're originally from Macau, right? You were born in Macau. Where does your family come from before Macau? My parents come from China. Yeah. Which part? Zhongshan. Zhongshan. What province is that? It's Guangdong. Guangdong. Yep. Okay. So you're born in Macau. You decided at a certain point after going to university there, you decided to come to America. Why did you come to America? What were you looking for and did you find it? Yeah, that's definitely a good question. I mostly come here for education as well as personal experience and a lot of obviously opportunities as well, right? Yeah. Did you find the opportunity? Did you find a good education? Yeah, definitely education as we have been talking about, yeah. So you're living the American dream but it's also kind of the Chinese dream as well, right? So welcome to America. We're so glad you're here. Thank you. You make a big contribution and your brain and your heart are a really important part of our success here in Hawaii. Sure. And I hope that your professional success continues. Sure. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for being with us here on Asia Pacific Business Strategies and we'll see you again soon. Take care.