Applied AI and decision systems in production.
About / Jinghang “Jacky” Li
A scientist for systems that work.
I connect research depth, product judgment, and engineering discipline to build AI systems that help people make better decisions.
- Senior Data Scientist
- Chicago
- Applied AI
- Ph.D.

I’m Jinghang Li—Jacky to friends and colleagues—a Senior Data Scientist based in Chicago.
My work sits where machine learning meets a real operating system: changing data, product constraints, human judgment, and outcomes that matter. I build agentic AI, recommendation systems, and the evaluation and data foundations that make them dependable.
I earned my Ph.D. at the University of Illinois Chicago, where I researched continuous model adaptation using online meta-learning. That work shaped a lasting instinct: useful intelligence must be designed for change, not only for a frozen benchmark.
Today, I bring that research mindset to production—framing the decision around the model, making uncertainty visible, and creating feedback loops that improve the whole system over time.
Read my experience →Research depth.
Production pace.
Online meta-learning and continuous model adaptation.
AWS, Azure, PyTorch, TensorFlow, and modern AI systems.
How I approach an AI problem.
Design the system around the model
Start with the decision, workflow, constraints, and people—not a model in isolation.
Make decisions legible
Expose evidence, uncertainty, tradeoffs, and a clear path for human review.
Prefer feedback to frozen scores
Measure behavior through time and turn real outcomes into the next improvement.