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Bosch in the USA
Lead Research Scientist, Bosch Research

“I get to wear many different hats.”

Panpan Xu

Panpan Xu

As a Lead Research Scientist for Bosch Research in Sunnyvale, California, Panpan is responsible for the development of interactive data visualization interfaces and data mining systems.

What are your main tasks as a Research Scientist? What are you working on?

My main task is to research and develop interactive data visualization interfaces to help people gain insights from large scale and complex data in a variety of Bosch business areas. My research goal is empowering people to understand data and communicate their insights more efficiently through the development of new interactive visualization systems and data mining algorithms. I use a multidisciplinary approach combining techniques in machine learning, data visualization, and human-computer interaction.

I am working on explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) and interpretable machine learning. Most of the AI-assisted decision making nowadays uses highly complex models which can be quite unintelligible for humans to understand. There is the potential threat that such AI systems can base their decisions on biases that may exist in the data and the systems can also have trust and compliance issues. Explainable AI technology is the key to ensure reliable, robust and fair use of AI in the real-world.

What makes your work at Bosch special?

Bosch is one global company with many ways of working: From start-ups to established corporate structures, we offer a wide range of working environments.

At Bosch Research I have the opportunity to oversee the whole lift cycle of projects from initial research prototyping to the eventual development and roll out of successful products. This is both a challenging and rewarding experience. I get to wear many different hats: sometimes I am a researcher, looking for state-of-the-art solutions to a problem; sometimes I am a software developer, being really hands on to develop minimum viable products; sometimes I pitch ideas / solutions to customers; sometimes I am a mentor for PhD interns doing research at Bosch. It is a quite unique combination of different roles.

About

Panpan Xu

Panpan Xu

Lead Research Scientist, Bosch Corporate Research

Panpan began her career with Bosch in 2015 as a Research Scientist at Bosch Research in Sunnyvale, California. She received her Bachelors degree in Computer Science from Zhejiang University and her PhD in Computer Science from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She was also a visiting research scholar at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research at Bosch has received Best Paper Award (2018) and Best Paper Honorable Mention Award (2016) at the IEEE Visualization conference. She serves as program committee member in conferences including IEEE Visualization, IEEE PacificVis, ACM IUI.

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