Alex Liu

Alex Liu (formerly Yongchuan Liu) is a Chinese American data science practitioner and a democracy advocate.
Early life
Alex Liu was born in Jinggangshan City, China. He started publishing about mathematical social science as a college student.
Education
In 1982, Liu received his B.S. of Mechanical Engineering from the Northwestern Polytechnical University, followed by a M.A. of Sociology from Peking University.
In 1986, Mr. Liu came to the United States to study both statistics and sociology at Stanford University under the sponsorship of Fulbright Program; he earned his doctorate in sociology from the same university in 1993, plus a M.S. of Computational Statistics.
Career
After his graduation from Stanford, Dr. Liu served as a research fellow at the Asia Pacific Research Center and Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Then, he founded and managed a consulting and training company CATE (GEC).
He taught at the University of Southern California from 2001 to 2002, then the University of California at Irvine from 2003 to 2010, while consulted for the United Nations and USAID.
From 2010 to 2012, Alex served as a data scientist for a few companies including Yapstone, ZestAI, Isky and Retention Science. In 2013, he joined IBM, and served as their chief data scientist until late 2019, where he developed a special ecosystem approach to data science . While working for IBM, he was certified as a thought leader and a distinguished data scientist by IBM and The Open Group . After IBM, Alex served as a founder and a managing director for the RMDS Lab, and an advisor to the Harvard Data Science Review.
Other work
Liu was a participant of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, and founded the Independent Federation of Chinese Students and Scholars (IFCSS). Representing the IFCSS, he worked with the Bush administration to protect Chinese students studying in the United States then, for the Executive Order 12711 and the Chinese Student Protection Act of 1992. He is also one of the leaders started the Memorials for the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, and a main organizer for the Washington March for Chinese Democracy.
Due to this, Mr. Liu was singled out by the Chinese government and banned from China in 1989.
In 2003, under the sponsorship of the United Nations, Dr. Liu worked alongside the Sri Lanka government and non-profit organizations in Colombo to help the Sri Lanka peace effort. From 2006 to 2008, under the sponsorship of the United States Agency for International Development, he led efforts of establishing the Kazakhstan American Center for Entrepreneurship and Business Innovation in Uralski of Kazakhstan, and the Kyrgyzstan American Center for Entrepreneurship and Business Innovation in Osh of Kyrgyzstan.
Liu also worked on latent variable approaches for measuring social science concepts like democracy and spiritual capital with some measurement tools established for public use.
Publications
* "Transforming Health Care with Big Data and AI" InfoAge Publishing 2020
* “Applying Satellite Observations of Tropical Cyclone Internal Structures to Rapid Intensification Forecast with Machine Learning” Geophysical Research Letters 2020
* "Apache Spark Machine Learning Blueprints" Packt Publishing 2016
* "Structural equation modeling and latent variable approaches", Wiley 2005
* “Democracy Satisfaction and Political Participation in Newly Democracies”, 1999 Michigan CISS
* “The Effect of Copayments and Income on the Utilization of Medical Care by Subscribers to Japan's National Health Insurance System” International Journal of Health Services 1995
* "Patterns and Results of Third Democratization Wave", University Press of America 1993

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