Hongyao Shao
Data Science & Business student at Boston University. I work at the intersection of data, technology, and business.
About
I'm a third-year student at Boston University pursuing a B.S. in Data Science and a B.S.B.A. in Business Administration & Management with a Finance concentration. I'm passionate about turning data into insights and decisions, whether that's building ML pipelines, analyzing financial markets, or visualizing complex datasets.
Technical Project Manager at BU Spark!, and previously an analyst in investment and Web3 contexts. I enjoy building side projects that sit at the edge of what I know.
Outside of work, I'm a travel enthusiast always chasing the next destination, and a big football fan :) Visca Barça !
Education
Boston University
B.S. Data Science
B.S.B.A. Business Administration & Management Finance Concentration
Expected May 2027
Research Interests
Machine learning and large language models, with a particular interest in mechanistic interpretability, understanding the internal representations and circuits of neural networks, and LLM-driven content analysis in social contexts.
Skills
Project Highlights
View all →Emotion Recognition from Audio →
Feb 2025 – May 2025Python/TensorFlow pipeline that transforms raw audio into mel-spectrograms for CNN-based emotion classification. Fine-tuned model performance through structured hyperparameter sweeps across speech and song datasets.
Progressive Mass: Home Rule Petition →
Sep 2025 – Dec 2025End-to-end data pipeline using the MA Legislature Public API to collect and structure 10 years of petition data. Built a refiling fatigue analysis dashboard to quantify repeated filings and their impact on success rates.
Boston Building Heating Systems: BCAN Data Integration →
Jan 2026 – May 2026Building-level dataset integrating three City of Boston public datasets to infer heating systems, paired with a client-facing property map that helps BCAN identify high-emission buildings for decarbonization outreach.
Beyond the Screen
Life beyond the screen — travels, football, and everything in between.
Take a look →Contact
- GitHub