Wen XIE

Atlanta, GA

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Wen is a Faculty Postdoctoral Fellow in the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University. His work bridges foundational AI models and production-ready ML pipelines, with applications in content understanding, advertising intelligence, recommendation systems, and user behavior modeling.

Technical Expertise

Wen has extensive experience building production ML systems and applying state-of-the-art AI methods to solve real-world problems:

  • Multimodal AI & Foundation Models: Fine-tuning vision-language models for video understanding, summarization, and content annotation; designing multimodal fusion architectures for vision, audio, and text; building large-scale embedding and retrieval systems
  • Large-Scale ML Systems: End-to-end ML pipeline design from data processing to deployment; building two-tower models for ad response prediction and recommendation; optimizing models for performance and scalability
  • Computer Vision for Production: Object detection and image segmentation; shot-level video embedding, clustering, and retrieval
  • NLP & LLM Systems: Multi-hop question answering, summarization, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG); transformer-based models for structured and unstructured text; LLM-based agents for document automation and knowledge workflows
  • Causal & Decision-Centric Modeling: Causal inference at scale using observational data; bridging prediction with decision-making

Research Focus

Wen applies these computational methods to address practical problems in contextual advertising and related areas, emphasizing the impact of congruence across different domains:

  • Social Media Marketing: How does exposure to a preceding story influence viewers' engagement with subsequent advertisements on platforms like Instagram and Snapchat?
  • Brand Communications: How does skin tone alignment between the brand's imagery and the audience affect engagement?
  • TV Advertising: How does TV program influence viewers' attention to the embedded advertisements?
  • Online Reviews: How does identity alignment between the reviewer and the restaurant shape cuisine evaluations?

Career

Wen is currently seeking opportunities as an Assistant Professor in Marketing or related fields.

Faculty Postdoctoral Fellow

Northeastern University

The Institute for Experiential AI

  • Wen is working with Prof. Yakov Bart to develop computational methods for tackling complex marketing challenges, with a particular focus on advertising effectiveness and contextual alignment.

Research Scientist

Snap Inc.

Computational Social Science Team

  • Have you ever watched a food ad longer when it appears right after your friend's food story?
  • Wen led this project on enhancing ad engagement by leveraging contextual features, working with Maarten Bos, Ron Dotsch, Yozen Liu.

Machine Learning Researcher

Apple Inc.

Web Answers and Ranking Team

  • Do you know how a search engine finds the best answer when the information is scattered across multiple sources?
  • Wen led this research with Kartik Perisetla on open-domain multi-hop question-answering using text summarization and generative models (T5, BART, CtrlSum)

Education

  • Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering University of Houston
  • B.ENG in Electrical Information Engineering University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
  • B.ECON in Finance University of Electronic Science and Technology of China