CECILIA'S PORTFOLIO
EDUCATIONAL HISTORY
Learning and Living
Nobody is born a professional in their industry; everyone who wants to be exceptional at something must work hard at it, both through practical work experience and education. Education and upskilling have played a huge role in my career. I strongly believe it is a lifelong journey, not a collection of certificates. The ability to absorb knowledge and apply it in real-world situations to solve business challenges, to me, is a way of thinking out of the box.
BSc, Computer Science, King's College London
1985 - 1988
Compared to technology nowadays it would be quite different from what I have learned during my university time. The degree opened the door for me to SunLife Canada working as an IT programmer and supporting Pension System, also providing support to the actuarial team as APL was the language I took and only a handful of people know this language at the time.
​
The Degree also got me into HSBC as an internal auditor reviewing computer systems developed at the bank. The vice principal at the university wrote me a reference and recommended I go after this position.
Business Systems Analyst Online Certification, Inquestra Learning
2007
Online course for IT Business Analysis. Although such experience was obtained throughout my career working in different areas this course put a rubber stamp on my qualifications and I got a distinction from this course.
Six Sigma Green Belt Online Certification, Villanova University
2012
Fundamentals of Six Sigma for quality improvement methodology. Understand the data collection methods, root cause analysis and tools. I was able to apply the knowledge quickly at work after this course.
Future Commerce Online Certification, MIT
2016
Focus on business strategy for fintech innovation this immersive online course empowers me with the knowledge to develop strategic frameworks for creating business models, presenting an investment thesis, or proposing regulatory changes around fintech innovation.
Google Data Analytics Certification, Coursera
2022
Already an expert in SQL and databases. This course is a refresher on data analysis and cleansing, new skills obtained in using Big Query, and data visualisation using Tableau and R.
Big Query is another SQL platform which I am very comfortable with. Also, leveraging Tableau's visualisation capabilities to craft a compelling narrative around CO2 emissions in Europe based on some collected data. Present the analysis through a data-driven story and highlight the significance of the findings by leveraging Tableau product features. As for R, I have performed practical exercises to leverage R packages and functions to view, cleanse, manipulate, change, summarise and visualise data. Practise using markdown files, which allows documentation of dynamic codes, comments and results in one file. In addition, a series of data plotting exercises were done for visualisation, combining graphs and comparing variables in a tailor-made graphical format. Extend the knowledge further to create a one-pager CV using R-Markdown.
Google UX Design Certificate, Coursera
2023 started but finished in 2024 (personal reasons)
Equip myself with new skills to learn about the UX Design Framework. From research, competitors’ analysis, interviews, paper & digital wireframing, presentation and low/ high-fidelity prototyping to conducting usability studies. Include accessibility and iterating on designs to ensure they conform to the WCAG standards.
Three projects have been developed during this course to apply the knowledge in a real-world scenario (UX case studies)
Generative AI and LLM Engineering
November 2024 / December 2025
Generative AI - An overview of generative AI concepts, from the fundamentals of large language models to responsible AI principles. Practical exercises to demonstrate skills in prompt engineering, image analysis, and multimodal generative techniques using Vertex AI.
LLM Engineering - Developed foundational skills in AI and machine learning by exploring frontier and open-source models, and mastering prompt engineering (including one-shot, zero-shot, and multi-shot techniques). Used web scraping to extract information for company brochures. Progressed to gradients, multi-modality, and early agentization. Gained hands-on experience with the Hugging Face ecosystem, working with pipelines, tokenizers, models, and deployment for inference. Using the LangChain opensource framework to simplify the creation of apps and apply Gradio as UI. Advanced to selecting and deploying Large Language Models (LLMs), generating code, and achieving a 15,000x performance improvement on a code conversion project. Built shopping and airline bots, and developed Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems using Chroma and FAISS for expert systems. Focused on fine-tuning frontier models with a strong emphasis on data curation. Ultimately, fine-tuned an open-source model with QLoRa and optimized hyperparameters, outperforming frontier models.