A defining moment for me was a conversation with Ning Ning Yu (VP, R&D), where I learned about Taboola’s mission to support publishers and the exciting opportunities to leverage AI in our products.” Meet Allen Chang, R&D Team Lead, who leads comprehensive projects and a team at Taboola’s R&D hub in Taiwan. After beginning his career as a LEAP Fellow and Data Scientist at Taboola LA five years ago, Allen took the opportunity to step into a leadership role and expand his expertise, where he’s gained the experience to apply data science to products, work with large-scale data, and build data science infrastructures that significantly impact Taboola and the publishers they work with.
Behind the scenes, building Taboola’s NLU solution
“When I began working at Taboola, I started the Natural Language Understanding (NLU) solution development, which was an exciting project to take on,” Allen shared.
(NLU) is a field of machine learning used to interpret and understand human language.
“At the time, Taboola had been using a third-party solution to collect NLU information, which was costly and did not support many languages. Within my first two years working at Taboola, our team gradually collected data and built in-house systems to replace the third-party solution, saving Taboola a substantial amount of money each year. It also helped us further develop Taboola’s Content Taxonomy (or system) to capture even more granular information and put it to use for commercial intent.”
From developing NLU solution to leading the team behind them
Allen shares that one of his most exciting achievements (so far) has been leading the team responsible for developing Taboola’s NLU solution. Taboola NLU generates diverse content features that serve as the foundation for several essential products, including Topic Insights, Contextual Targeting, Campaign Review, and recommendation systems. “This initiative has significantly impacted the business by enhancing our product offerings and driving more targeted and effective solutions for our clients.”
Allen continues, “It’s been a great achievement to gradually lead others on related projects and build company knowledge around NLU. Becoming a team lead to a group focused on maintaining and developing all NLU systems has been a great honor, especially to watch my team members grow from junior engineers to seasoned professionals. I’m particularly proud of witnessing my team members grow and succeed, achieving significant milestones along the way.”
Applying a growth mindset for self & team development
Throughout his time at Taboola, Allen has embraced a growth mindset of continuous learning that has helped him transform the team’s approach to NLU and other initiatives. “The best advice I’ve received is always to prioritize learning and to remain humble and kind,” he shares, which was helpful when encountering occasional challenges. For example, during A/B testing for the Predictive Segment solution, the team faced difficulties due to limited experience with A/B testing infrastructure, which led to a production system disruption, a common challenge for data scientists.
Having dealt with similar situations, Allen focused on learning from the incident and improving the process to prevent future issues. He later initiated a study group around the book Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments: A Practical Guide to A/B Testing, significantly expanding the team’s understanding and helping them overcome the obstacles.
Additionally, Allen notes that the weekly study group brings the team together to read and discuss insightful books like The Effective Engineer, Clean Architecture, and Computational Advertising. He adds, “These meetings foster continuous learning and keep our team engaged with new concepts that we can infuse into our work.”
Making an Impact on Taboola
Allen goes on to share that “Every six months to a year, we dive into new initiatives besides NLU, such as building developing subscription boosting algorithms, building matching systems for e-commerce products, and creating predictive segments,” which channels team engagement, excitement of new challenges, and the opportunity to help clients increase their effectiveness. From NLUs helping publishers with Topic Insights features in Taboola Newsroom to editors being able to see their traffic on different topics, keywords, and content categories and comparing those to the Taboola network to see the short and long-term trends, “I enjoy knowing that my work directly helps our business.”
“As I reflect on the past five years at Taboola, I’m proud of the meaningful work I’ve accomplished and the fact that I’ve been able to share my passions and creativity with the teams I’ve worked with. From having leaders who care to having the incredible opportunity to collaborate with top talents on a variety of projects, each experience has allowed me to deepen my understanding of data science. It’s this type of work and the ongoing potential to innovate and contribute to a mission that truly resonates with me and keeps me excited to continue growing here.”
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