Available for new engagements

Unlock Business Value
with Applied AI

I partner with small and mid-size companies to identify untapped opportunities and build production-grade ML solutions that drive customer engagement and revenue.

10+
Years in ML & Data
8yr
Principal Scientist @ Amazon
PhD
Applied Math, UCLA
3
Core Domains: Search, Rec, AI Agents
👤
Zhimin Peng, PhD
Founder & Principal AI/ML Consultant

I founded Latent Value Lab to bring senior-level AI and ML expertise to companies that don't yet have it in-house. My work bridges rigorous applied mathematics with the pragmatic demands of shipping production systems at scale.

Currently an Applied Scientist at Amazon, where I lead the development of search, recommendation, and agentic conversational video discovery systems for Fire TV — serving tens of millions of users. I also have deep experience building ML systems for fraud detection, gaining a strong appreciation for high-stakes, real-time inference.

My goal is simple: help your company find the AI opportunities hiding in plain sight, and build the systems to capture them.

🎓
PhD, Applied Mathematics — University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
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Applied Scientist @ Amazon — 8 years building Fire TV Search, Recommendation & Agentic Systems
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Deep expertise in Search, Recommendation, Fraud Detection, and Conversational AI
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End-to-end delivery — from opportunity discovery to production deployment at scale

What I Can Build for You

From strategy to shipping — I work across the full ML lifecycle to deliver measurable business outcomes.

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Search & Recommendation Systems

Design and build personalized search and recommendation engines that surface the right content, products, or experiences to the right users — increasing engagement and conversion.

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Agentic AI & Conversational Systems

Architect LLM-powered agents and conversational products that go beyond Q&A — taking actions, personalizing responses, and integrating with your data and workflows.

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Fraud Detection & Trust & Safety

Build real-time ML systems to detect fraud, abuse, and anomalous behavior — protecting your users and business while minimizing false positives that hurt good customers.

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ML Platform & Production Deployment

Establish the infrastructure, pipelines, and MLOps practices needed to take models from notebook to production — reliably, repeatably, and at scale.

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Data Strategy & Analytics

Audit your existing data assets, identify gaps, and design an instrumentation and analytics strategy that turns raw data into actionable business intelligence.

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AI Product Strategy & Roadmapping

Work with your leadership and product team to identify the highest-ROI AI opportunities, prioritize initiatives, and build a credible technical roadmap you can execute against.

From First Call to Shipped Product

A focused, hands-on engagement model designed to move fast and deliver real results.

01
Discovery

We start with a free conversation to understand your business, current data assets, and the outcomes that matter most to you.

02
Opportunity Assessment

I map your data landscape to identify the highest-ROI ML opportunities — quick wins and longer-term strategic bets.

03
Build & Deploy

Hands-on development of production-ready solutions. I write real code, build real systems, and ship them alongside your team.

04
Transfer & Scale

Knowledge transfer, documentation, and ongoing advisory so your team owns and can extend what we built together.

Let's Talk About Your Challenges

Whether you have a specific project in mind or just want to explore what's possible with AI for your business, I'd love to hear from you.

Ready to find the value hiding in your data?

I work with a small number of clients at a time to ensure focused, high-quality engagements. Reach out early — let's see if we're a good fit.

Send Me a Message
Currently accepting new client engagements