About Me 

Dr. Hood Chang (張嘉祜) is the Chief Data Officer (CDO) at Vpon, a leading AI big data company with 8 offices in Asia. He oversees data-related product development, corporate data strategy, data partnership, as well as data business and technical alignment. He leads a data science team of around 50 people, including product/project managers, data/business analysts, software engineers, data/site reliability engineers, machine learning engineers, data scientists, data engineers, etc.

Dr. Chang joined Vpon as a data engineer in 2014, experienced various positions/roles, and has been involved in marketing activities and technical due diligence. He is passionate about creating data applications and collaborating with business roles to grow and transform the business with the use of data in different verticals and geographic regions. Dr. Chang's significant achievements include building the Trata Data Management Platform and supporting the establishment of business relationships with key players in Japan's travel and tourism industry.

Dr. Chang had extensive hands-on experience in managing clients' direct response marketing campaigns by human-machine collaboration, e.g., creating optimization strategies based on both analytics and developed machine learning modules. One of the remarkable cases is the Uber App download promotion in Asia. He led the data team to co-work with campaign managers to deliver 1M+ installs with 0.3M first rides in one year (2015-2016) and reach an average conversion rate of around 6%. This case won Bronze for the 2016 Top Mobile Awards (TMA) in the Big Data Marketing Category.

Dr. Chang built the multidisciplinary team from scratch and evolved into a hybrid centralized/embedded structure. His team is responsible for the research, development, training/promotion/operation support, execution of internal and external data products/solutions, and data procurement. The team helped Vpon get various industrial certifications, such as Google Technology Partner, Google Marketing Platform, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Google Data Studio, ISO 27001/27701, etc. The data products developed by Dr. Chang and his team received the National Brand Yushan Award (國家品牌玉山獎) in the Best Product category in 2021 and 2022.

Dr. Chang holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from NTU and has published more than 20 research papers in international journals and conferences. He also contributed several book chapters for the books (e.g., Online Multimedia Advertising: Techniques and Technologies) published in USA: Springer-Verlag, IGI Global, CRC Press, etc. He is also one of the authors of books with reputed national publishers. He has held a lecturer role at Taiwan AI Academy (台灣人工智慧學校) since 2019 and at National Open University. He has been invited to give talks and share experiences in related fields and activities, e.g., 資策會數位行銷專家策略會議 (2021), 資策會數據專家策略會議 (2020), 立法院人工智慧發展基本法草案公聽會 (2019), etc. In addition, he served as a reviewer for several international conferences and journals, such as IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM).

Prior to joining Vpon in 2014, he was a postdoctoral research fellow working closely with the researchers and professors in the Communication and Multimedia Lab (CMLab) in the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering (CSIE), National Taiwan University. He received a B.S. degree in electrical engineering (EE) from NCHU, and a M.S. degree in communication engineering (CE) from NCU. Such multidisciplinary experience has supported both his academic and industrial competence. It helps him effectively communicate with a wide range of people and create innovation. Dr. Chang's research interests include user behavior analytics, video streaming, computational advertising, computer vision, and education. In 2018, he received the Best Paper Award from the IEEE Transactions on Education.