Zhongyi Tang

AI agents, evaluation & experimentation.

I am a Research Data Scientist at Google. I build useful agents, evaluate their behavior, and measure their impact, drawing on my background in causal inference, experimentation, and machine learning.

From 2024 to 2026, I was an Economist at Amazon, where I built and evaluated agents for analytics and experimentation—from translating questions into SQL to automating analysis and reporting. I also designed experiments and improved causal methods for measuring business impact.

I received my Ph.D. in Economics from Boston University in 2024. Earlier, at Stanford, I worked on using satellite imagery and deep learning to understand economic development.

Experience

Full CV
Present

Research Data Scientist

Google

2024–2026

Economist II

Amazon

2017–2019

Research Analyst

Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research

Publications

Google Scholar

AEA Papers and Proceedings 2026

A New Perspective on Spatial Heterogeneity in African Development

Pascaline Dupas, Nicolas Suarez, and Zhongyi Tang.

All authors contributed equally.

We combine satellite imagery and survey data to map infrastructure access across Africa using machine learning. We then use spatial regression discontinuity to estimate the impact of national institutions on infrastructure access.

Nature Communications 2020

Using publicly available satellite imagery and deep learning to understand economic well-being in Africa

Christopher Yeh, Anthony Perez, Anne Driscoll, George Azzari, Zhongyi Tang, David Lobell, Stefano Ermon, and Marshall Burke.

We combine deep learning with public daytime and nighttime satellite imagery to predict local asset wealth across sub-Saharan Africa. Trained on survey-based wealth measures, the models are evaluated on unseen locations and on changes in wealth over time.

Education

Ph.D. in Economics

Boston University

B.S. in Economics (Honors) & Mathematics

Trinity College

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