Huacen Xu |

About Me

Hi, I’m a Data Scientist & Engineer at BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager. I work on Aladdin Data — the data platform behind Aladdin, BlackRock’s investment and risk platform — building the engineering layer of data governance: certification automation, compliance pipelines, and AI-grounded agent tooling, alongside ML solutions for enterprise-scale financial data.

My background combines published research with hands-on engineering. I apply computational methods — NLP, embedding models, predictive modeling — to social and economic questions, and bring research rigor to production systems: governance certification automation, Python frameworks that reduce manual oversight, and ML-driven data quality improvements.

Focus Areas

Governance Engineering & Automation: Building the tooling behind enterprise data governance — certification automation, compliance pipelines, and AI-grounded agent skills.
Computational Social Science & Applied ML: NLP, embedding models, and predictive modeling applied to social and economic questions — peer-reviewed research on moral framing, credit access, and housing disparities.
Data Tokenization (US Patent Pending): Co-inventor on a blockchain-based approach to tokenizing data access entitlements for enterprise data governance.

Selected Projects

Bond-Risk-Analyzer — Decision-tree insights and nearest-neighbor proxy identification to streamline risk analysis for financial datasets.
Embedding-Models-for-AI-Retrieval — Domain-specific embedding model for AI-powered document retrieval: synthetic data generation, fine-tuning, FAISS vector search, evaluated with MRR@5.
PRI-Insights-Chatbot — ML and LLM-powered question-answering and insight generation for enhanced data interaction.

Selected Publications

Student Loan Debt and the Black-White Homeownership Gap

Huacen Xu, C.J. Dawkins, M. Travis P., M. Chowdhury - Under Review, 2026

Predictive modeling of how student loan debt shapes racial disparities in homeownership — quantitative methods applied to a structural economic question.

Code
Convergence or Divergence? A Cross-Platform Analysis of Climate Change Visual Content Categories, Features, and Social Media Engagement on Twitter and Instagram

S. Qian, Y. Lu, Y. Peng, C.C. Shen, Huacen Xu - Public Relations Review, 2024

Unsupervised image clustering identified five categories of climate visuals and platform-specific engagement patterns — ML-driven visual content analysis at scale.
Can Microfinance Achieve Both Social and Financial Goals? Investigation on MicroCred Nanchong

Huacen Xu - Inclusive Finance in China (Palgrave Macmillan), 2021

Field investigation of how microfinance institutions balance social and commercial objectives.
Double Bind in Loan Access in China: The Reification of Gender Differences in Business Loans

Huacen Xu, H.J. Zhan, C.E.E. James, L.D. Fannin, Y. Yin - International Journal of Gender and Entrepreneurship, 2018

Predictive modeling of gender disparities in loan access — how perceived rejection likelihood suppresses applications.

Full publication list on Google Scholar. Code and projects on GitHub.