Welcome to our new Educator Ambassador Chee-wai, Ho!

[Pankaj_Muthe]

I am pleased to introduce Qlik Academic Program Educator Ambassador for 2025, Chee-wai, Ho from Republic Polytechnic, Singapore.

Chee-wai has been actively involved in upskilling adult learners in data literacy for more than five years in Republic Polytechnic’s Specialist Diploma in Business Analytics (SDBA) in Singapore. According to Chee-wai, “Data literacy in practical translates into identifying and correcting data issues, follow by data visualization to make informed business decisions. This is also the foundation for fruitful predictive and prescriptive analytics.”

[Pankaj_Muthe]

I am pleased to introduce Qlik Academic Program Educator Ambassador for 2025, Chee-wai, Ho from Republic Polytechnic, Singapore.

Chee-wai has been actively involved in upskilling adult learners in data literacy for more than five years in Republic Polytechnic’s Specialist Diploma in Business Analytics (SDBA) in Singapore. According to Chee-wai, “Data literacy in practical translates into identifying and correcting data issues, follow by data visualization to make informed business decisions. This is also the foundation for fruitful predictive and prescriptive analytics.”

In 2023, Chee-wai successfully added Qlik Cloud to supplement the current tool suite used in the SDBA curriculum. Three intakes of SDBA participants have experienced using Qlik Cloud and more are projected to benefit from this valuable addition, ensuring future participants receive the same well-rounded learning experience.

Chee-wai says, “While Qlik Cloud has powerful data wrangling and visualization capabilities, these are not the main draws of using Qlik Cloud for SDBA. Instead, Qlik Cloud provides SDBA participants with a practical introduction of how AI can improve the process of data visualization and analysis. With this as the focus, SDBA participants first experience with Qlik Cloud is through Insight Advisor. While Insight Advisor is not promoted as Gen AI, its output is akin to what Gen AI can produce albeit in the focused realm of discovering existing patterns and relationships within existing data.”

To Chee-wai, this is a strength and not a weakness. He further adds, Insight Advisor serves as an intelligent bridge between Qlik Sense’s comprehensive data ingestion/transformation capabilities and its sophisticated data visualization capabilities. Starting round 2023, there are LLMs touted as being capable of data analysis.  Indeed, they do a credible job but only for straightforward data sets. Are they able to seamlessly connect to your corporate data warehouse, navigate a complicated star schema and present insights? What about the data visualizations produced? Can these be weaved into a coherent and aesthetically pleasing presentation easily? Likely in future but not for the time being. Using Insight Advisor, the entire cycle of ingestion and visualization is much more automated, integrated and done at scale. This is what Chee-wai wanted SDBA participants to experience from Qlik Cloud’s Insight Advisor. Having said that, he is aware that there is Qlik Cloud LLM integration. However, this incrementally improves the Qlik Cloud process and does not drive the core engine that produces Qlik Cloud’s output. It remains to be seen whether this will change going forward.

According to Chee-wai, many participants were pleasantly surprised to find that Insight Advisor was as proficient as they were in answering queries directed at a complicated RDBMS data schema. Qlik Cloud’s greatest strength lies in its ability to blend connectivity to disparate data sources at scale, automate visualization and analysis, and easily incorporate these into data stories.

As a Qlik ambassador, Chee-wai hopes to see graph database support in Qlik Cloud to identify less obvious trends and relationships between entities, further enhancing the tool's capabilities. He also hopes that Qlik's academic license will provide access to auto ML, which will significantly enhance the SDBA experience by reducing the effort and cognitive load required to access machine learning in an enterprise setting. He also understands that despite the technical robustness of the Qlik platform, without the support from the Asia Pacific Academic Programme office, the adoption and sustained use of Qlik Cloud could have been challenging for the SDBA participants. For this, he is very grateful for the support and encouragement given.

Looking to 2025 and beyond, Chee-wai sees AI being increasingly commoditized, improving access and ubiquity. Some tasks previously done by specialized, purpose-built models will be handled by GenAI. After all, a foundation model is a vast repository of encoded knowledge, and techniques to tap into this productively (and widely) will continue to improve. There is also the likelihood that several specialized models will be replaced by a single, general but equally capable model.

Away from work, Chee-wai enjoys spending time outdoors hiking mountains in Asia and playing board games that involve strategic thinking. With more automation from AI, he hopes to have even more time (and opportunities) to enjoy these activities.

For more information about the Qlik Academic Program, visit: qlik.com/academicprogram

To know more about the Qlik Academic Program Ambassadors, visit: https://www.qlik.com/us/company/academic-program/ambassadors