About

I am In Son Zeng. I am from Macau, a lovely and historical place with area as small as about 20 square miles. My undergraduate at the University of Macau and master’s studies at the University of Michigan are related to Statistics and Mathematics, with a specialization in mathematical and statistical modeling. My professional knowledge was applied to interdisciplinary scenarios, including environmental protection, inclusive education and sociological problems (Awarded Agent-based Modelling Paper, COMAP 2017, Twitter Political Ideal Point Prediction, 2018). My previous teachings are found in both residential, in-person courses (See Regression 1, Regression 2 and Regression 3 for STATS 412 class), and online, asynchronous education.

Central to my passion involves outputting multi-modality MOOCs (Massive Open Online Course) to disseminate leading methodologies and technical trainings with low cost. I started to develop the Applied Probabilistic Data Science in Python specialization that teaches Bayesian Statistics and Data Visualization in content-heavy, math-light fashion, using critical and participatory approach. I hope to explore how sustainable learning communities can be created at the intersection of the areas of culturally relevant content, psychological sense of ownership, and learning analytics in my very first MOOC in Coursera (currently undertaking beta testing).

The COVID-19 challenge, on top of long-existed educational disparities taken place globally, has inspired my vision to offer high-quality education globally.

My educational vision “Make the world see!” and design principle “Start small, grow big” responds to the widening educational inequality due to pandemic and wealth gap. Starting from Bayesian statistics, I am planning to offer courses such as Machine Learning, Instructional Design, AI-assisted Educational Technology to grow the global community with the awareness of the rising real-life technologies. To extend the programming education context to wider public, I am actively accepting new comic writers working together to transform digital contexts, coding concepts, theories into humorous comic drawings with lower cognitive load.

While AI technologies are profoundly impacting society around the globe, the applications of AI are not immune to the risks of pitfalls of data-driven, AI-supported tools. I’m aware of and at the critical time to answer some research questions such as 1) How can we prepare K-12 students for an AI-permeated future? 2) How to enhance algorithmic fairness when predicting student’s learning outcome and behaviors? 3) How to arouse deeper dialogues among researchers working on AI-supported education and educational technology of the “Fairness, Accountability, Transparency and Ethics”, the FATE of AI around the ethical and societal implications of AI? The Educational Technology Collectives lab I currently work with deeply engages with the concerns about the present and future roles of AI in education, that is the primary reason why I have always been grateful to work with professor Christopher Brooks and his research team!

Music has always been my favorite pastime! Over 8 years, I love performing and composing music, so this is my page about some musical performances I attended. Recently inspired by the rising significance of music information retrieval, I started to extract features from polyphonic music and wrote tutorials for the Master’s of Applied Data Science program. I continue to spend time composing a cappella music, instrumental music and involving in audio editing every week. If you love music composition or music information retrieval, please do not feel hesitant to reach out me at insonz@umich.edu.