I am a PhD candidate in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) department at Northwestern University. I am a member of the Communications and Networking laboratory, working under the supervision of Professor Randall Berry (Northwestern University) and Professor Vijay Subramanian (now at University of Michigan).

I joined Northwestern University in September 2012 as a doctoral student under the Vietnam Education Foundation Fellowship. On the way, I earned my Master Degree here in June 2014 and continued through my PhD program.

My work at Northwestern includes studying bandwagon-type effects for models of Bayesian observational learning in social networks, which resembled many online recommendation systems (Amazon, Yelps, etc.). We studied models under different information structures and discovered many interesting, non-intuitive results: while noisy observations could help customers in their learning processes, additional information such as customers’ reviews/feedback could worsen their purchasing decisions. The main techniques used were hypothesis testing, Markov analysis, random walks, martingales processes and Monte-Carlo simulation. In addition, my research interest includes data science, machine learning, probabilistic models, game theory, quantitative finances, and optimization and resources allocation in communications networks.

I am expected to graduate in June/August 2017. I am looking for a full-time data scientist position.

Contact me at:

emails: thole2012[at]u.northwestern.edu, thonle2012@gmail.com