Data Science Pioneer Influences Business Strategies
Hospitality Technology’s Top Women in Restaurant Technology Awards, now in their fifth year, recognize women who are making their mark in a male-dominated industry. In the coming weeks we will be profiling each of the 10 honorees in-depth on hospitalitytech.com/topwomen21.
Innovator
Mingming Zhang, head of data science at Wisely
Mingming Zhang is responsible for Wisely’s suite of algorithms that accurately predict the wait times at thousands of restaurants -- to its proprietary Natural Language Processing (NLP) that annotates the sentiment of aggregated online customer reviews for Wisely’s restaurant partners.
Zhang is passionate about NLP technology and sees it as the future in not only retail but also in restaurants. Case in point: Amazon. “They are able to extract information from interactions with you and help you find what you’ll like. “The future will be about personalized guest experience to make life more tailored to your unique preferences—such a system truly makes everyone’s life better, for the customer and the business,” said Zhang.
Before joining Wisely, Zhang worked on Domino’s data science team. “My first project was to solve their fraud problems—a classic ML use-case,” Zhang recalled. “There’s a lot of fraud in ecommerce, but any company with a high volume of digital transactions is vulnerable—including the restaurant industry.”
Zhang says she’s most proud of her decision to make the move from a QSR to Wisely to be a pioneer of data science. “I’m proud of my decision and how I’ve influenced the way some of the fastest-growing restaurant brands think and are mapping out their business strategies.”
In the future Zhang expects restaurant tech to become “smarter and rise to the same level of sophistication as e-commerce,” she says. “Truly knowing your customer is the first step. With those answers, rooted in data and analytics, businesses can then respond but tailoring every action, communication, and business decision to the behaviors of your most valuable guests.”
About the Top Women in Restaurant Technology Awards
Winners were chosen by Hospitality Technology magazine and members of its Research Advisory Board. Winners will be profiled in the Summer 2021 issue of Hospitality Technology magazine and throughout June and July in digital profiles on www.hospitalitytech.com. The winners were announced and honored during a virtual awards program on April 14 at the 26th annual MURTEC (Multi-Unit Restaurant Technology Conference), which was streamed online. In the coming weeks we will be profiling each of the 10 honorees in-depth on hospitalitytech.com/topwomen21.