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Would you rather buy from a cuddly chatbot, or the “Lipstick King”?

Jennifer Anzaldi — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 18:03:48 +0000

Would you rather buy from a cuddly chatbot, or the “Lipstick King”? Jennifer Anzaldi Tue, 03/04/2025 - 13:03

In This Story

Si Xie

Historically, entertainment and advertising have worked as a tag team, taking turns soliciting attention from audiences. But our social-media age is blending the two into new, hybrid forms.

Witness livestream shopping, a seamless amalgam of e-commerce and entertainment. In place of one-way messaging delivered by polished pitchpeople, this model employs relatable influencers presenting products for online sale—and chatting with consumers—in real-time sessions that often last several hours.

Famously popular in China, livestream shopping is picking up steam in the United States. In June 2024, as an example, U.S. TikTok netted its first million-dollar livestream, courtesy of Texas-based brand Canvas Beauty. By 2026, live shopping may be responsible for as much as five percent of all e-commerce sales in the U.S., according to industry projections.

For global brands, this means a possible revenue explosion. But for information-systems scholars like Si Xie, assistant professor at Costello College of Business, the global rise of livestream shopping represents an unprecedented research opportunity.

Si Xie

“One of the most important elements of livestream shopping is the interaction,” Xie says. “Livestreams bring all potential buyers into the same virtual room, together with the influencer. People can see which products have been put in the online shopping cart, and which have been purchased.”

Her recently published paper in Production & Operations Management finds that the longer an individual product is showcased in a livestream featuring several different brands, the more revenue it will generate. Yet as product showcase duration goes up, overall revenue from the livestream goes down.

To reach their conclusions, the research team—including co-authors Siddhartha Sharma of Indiana University and Amit Mehra of University of Texas at Dallas—analyzed data from nearly 75,000 livestreams conducted in China during 2021.

For Xie, the findings point to a fundamental conflict between the incentives of livestreamers and the brands they promote. It is in the best interest of third-party influencers to move fairly rapidly between different types of products, but brands will want more airtime devoted to each one.

“People like variety,” Xie explains. “If I watch a livestream and all I see are shirts in different fabrics, I might feel there are not too many choices I can make. However, if you show me a shirt and then a pair of pants, I can make an outfit. There’s a higher probability of my making more purchases, and that’s in line with the third-party livestreamers’ incentives.”

One way to correct these misaligned incentives would be for brands to use the power of the purse to influence the influencers. In China, even the suggestion of such corrupting relationships has caused public scandal. In 2023, for example, top livestreamer Li Jiaqi (nicknamed “The Lipstick King” for his ability to sell beauty products) lost one million followers on social media after lashing out at an online commenter who complained about the high price of an eyebrow pencil made by Chinese cosmetics company Florasis. Li, Florasis’s most prominent brand ambassador, was excoriated for ostensibly putting his relationship with the brand above empathy for financially struggling consumers.

“People were saying, ‘you are trying to be defensive of the product because you get so much interest from selling that pencil’”, Xie says. “Therefore, Li’s credibility was really impaired.”

If Xie’s paper describes how human imperfections can jeopardize livestream shopping, could AI be the answer? Indeed, AI-powered animated chatbots — both paired with human influencers, and serving customers solo during off-peak sales hours — have become commonplace on China’s livestreams. For her PhD dissertation, Xie probed data from more than 70,000 livestreams in China and found that introducing an AI assistant boosted livestream sales by about 18%. But the effect steadily declined over time — and not because the novelty wore off. The rapidly improving algorithmic responses had the unintended consequence of shorter watch durations, which may have reduced impulse buying. Xie’s suggested remedy? “The owner of the gen-AI tools could modify the interaction between the virtual livestreamer and the audience to encourage more engagement, perhaps by adjusting the learning speed to ensure that the audience remains engaged for a longer period."

Xie also suggests that brands and channels replace humanoid avatars with cute, cuddly “mascots” that users just can’t bring themselves to click away from.

Xie says she’s working on future papers that tease insights out of livestream data. “One good thing about this new technology is that it promotes the user to buy using methods we can observe. Livestreamers sell general items like grocery items and clothing, as well as expensive stuff like cars and houses, and you can really see how people behave.”

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George �鶹��Ƶ professor furthers impact of telemedicine in Ukraine

Jennifer Anzaldi — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 22:39:16 +0000

George �鶹��Ƶ professor furthers impact of telemedicine in Ukraine Jennifer Anzaldi Tue, 01/14/2025 - 17:39

Ukraine’s health care system has been hit hard amid the ongoing war. Power outages, staffing shortages, and the destruction of hospitals have added up to a drastic reduction in available care for the already-vulnerable population. In a desperate attempt to bridge the gap, Ukraine’s Ministry of Health opened the country to telehealth solutions from overseas. But will these prove to be a successful substitute for at least some necessary services, or turn out to be no better than a tech Band-Aid?

Answering that question is where Mariia Petryk, assistant professor of information systems and operations management at the Costello College of Business at �鶹��Ƶ, comes in. In her spare time, she works as volunteer director of analytics for TeleHelp Ukraine (THU).

Mariia Petryk

Founded by a cross-disciplinary group of Stanford students shortly after the war’s inception, THU was designed to succeed where other telemedicine initiatives in crisis-affected areas have failed. The founders worked tirelessly to assemble an international volunteer network comprising medical professionals, translators, interpreters and administrative “health navigators.” Aware that medical consultations were only part of the patient journey, THU’s founders sought to address the entire continuum of care.

Petryk stresses that while the project originated at Stanford, the technical team included “people from Chicago, Boston, other California schools…some very active volunteers were in Australia, South Korea, Canada and other countries.”

Petryk, herself of Ukrainian descent, was honored to lend her data science expertise to this worthy project. As analytics director, she manages a dozen or so number-crunching volunteers who measured and documented THU’s impact upon Ukraine’s displaced population during the initiative’s first full year.

As Petryk explains, “The Russian invasion created a humanitarian crisis where a lot of people were internally displaced. And when people relocate to a new place, they don’t know where to go for health care. They also are at higher risk for many issues, including mental health problems. And they don’t know where to turn to treat chronic diseases they may have.”

THU’s primary focus during its first year was delivering much-needed services to this population of war-ravaged internal exiles.

Petryk’s analytical work gave rise to a recent case study of THU published in Journal of Global Health. The paper’s other lead author was Aditya Narayan, a Stanford medical student and THU’s director of implementation and evaluation.

Their findings describe some impressive early successes. THU facilitated more than 1,200 virtual patient appointments from May 2022 to May 2023 alone. Despite often-chaotic conditions, patient attendance rates were above 70 percent for nine of the 13 months studied. As the first year wore on, the THU team found ways to prevent no-shows—for example, employing the popular texting platform Viber to communicate with patients and assigning an individual health navigator to each patient.

Even more impressively, 96 percent of patients reported that their health complaints were at least partially resolved during their visit.

The paper argues that aspects of THU’s model could be adapted for use in other humanitarian contexts. In its initial growth phase, THU had access to advanced technological infrastructure and a wide network of medical providers, by dint of its academic origins. This implies that partnerships with academia could be critical to replicating THU’s success outside Ukraine.

Petryk remains proud of THU’s impact and her role in helping define it. “Based on actual appointments and how much that amount of care would cost at a hospital, THU delivered an estimated $1 million worth of services in its first 13 months,” she says.

Looking ahead to THU’s future, she says, “I can only wish to see this ‘start-up,’ as it were, go for the IPO.”

For more information and to explore volunteering opportunities, visit THU’s website.

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Mariia Petryk

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The NYPD gave officers iPhones. Here’s what we learned about race and policing

Jennifer Anzaldi — Tue, 04 Jun 2024 16:50:43 +0000

The NYPD gave officers iPhones. Here’s what we learned about race and policing Jennifer Anzaldi Tue, 06/04/2024 - 12:50

In This Story

Brad Greenwood

The controversy about biased policing seems to draw endless fuel from race-based differences in public perception. Simply put, the vast majority of White citizens in the United States believe the police are doing a good job, including on issues of racial equality, while a similar percentage of Black citizens hold the opposite opinion. And while a growing number of studies have indicated persistent patterns of racial discrimination in policing, an emergent concern among scholars is that the data these papers rely on are also subject to baked-in biases, since they often derive from officers’ self-reports of their own behavior.

Brad Greenwood

Enter Brad Greenwood, professor of information systems and operations management at the Donald G. Costello College of Business at �鶹��Ƶ. One of his research interests lies in how digital technologies are bringing unprecedented transparency to police practices. For example, Greenwood’s 2022 paper documented how the introduction of body-worn cameras for the New York Police Department (NYPD) resulted in a significant reduction in abuse-of-authority complaints.

His latest work on policing is forthcoming in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Along with Gordon Burtch from Boston University and Jeremy Watson from the University of Minnesota, Greenwood examined the recent rollout of iPhones across the NYPD, which included a series of digital tools designed to replace the handwritten memo books officers previously relied on. Instead of scribbling in the physical books, which NYPD officers were required to hang onto even into retirement, officers could log their activities directly into a centralized database maintained by the NYPD. These detailed digital records shed fresh light on how cops spend their time—and attention—on the beat.

The researchers tracked data on NYPD stops and complaints in 2017 and 2018, the period when iPhones were being rolled out across precincts in New York City. A curious pattern emerged. There was an 18% increase in reported stops after a precinct received iPhones, which would be consistent with the digital tools making it easier for officers to report a citizen interaction. Further, the researchers discovered that this increase resulted in neither more arrests nor more complaints from the public. It wasn’t, therefore, that the phones were somehow causing the police to stop people more often, but rather that so-called “unproductive stops”—those leading to no further action—were being reported more often.

However, when breaking the results down across White and non-White citizens, the researchers found that unproductive stops involving non-White citizens were entirely responsible for the increase. In other words, the observed changes were based on police encounters with non-White members of the public, that would likely have gone unreported in the days of pen and paper. More specifically, after switching to the smartphone system, officers logged 22% more stops involving non-White citizens, while the number of reported stops of White citizens remained unchanged. These are statistical averages—the pattern was more marked in high-crime neighborhoods and those with a greater proportion of non-White residents.

Greenwood offered an interpretation of the finding: “The concern here is that we have an underreporting, which is concentrated in certain groups and means that we need to be cautious when interpreting prior work. On the one hand, it opens the door to bias in police interactions with civilians being worse than initially anticipated, at least based on the frequency of stops. On the other hand, it could mean that older data doesn’t accurately reflect the likelihood of an arrest once a stop occurs. And we need to be doubly cautious, because we don’t know if officers are reporting stops more frequently just because it is easier, or for some other reason.”

Greenwood cautions against making sweeping conclusions based on the study. “The only thing we know for sure is that more and deeper work is needed by scholars and policy makers to ensure transparency between law enforcement and the people they are charged to protect,” he said.

On the whole, however, the study raises the possibility that race-based disparities in policing are not only very real, but may have been underestimated thus far because of reporting gaps.

As police officers are not obligated to document all civilian interactions, their decisions regarding what—and what not—to report can be biased. The introduction of new technology, as in the case of the NYPD, can help counter such biases, but is not the only avenue worth pursuing. The researchers recommend that police departments “investigate the appropriate organizational complements (i.e., policies and procedures) necessary to uncover and eliminate such biases.”

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George �鶹��Ƶ faculty are tackling cybersecurity’s talent pipeline problem

Jennifer Anzaldi — Fri, 10 May 2024 17:01:06 +0000

George �鶹��Ƶ faculty are tackling cybersecurity’s talent pipeline problem Jennifer Anzaldi Fri, 05/10/2024 - 13:01

If you’re a cybercriminal, the latest news on cybersecurity talent shortfalls should put a smile on your face. For example, the majority of cybersecurity leaders report that their teams are understaffed, and they have problems retaining qualified professionals.

But for Nirup Menon, a �鶹��Ƶ professor of information systems and operations management (ISOM), and Brian Ngac, an instructor in the ISOM area, this workforce challenge is a golden career opportunity for the young people of Northern Virginia and the Washington, D.C., area.

Nirup Menon and Brian Ngac

The pair recently won a two-year award from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency within the U.S. Department of Commerce, to create unique experiential learning opportunities and workshops designed to enhance cybersecurity education and workforce development.

Working closely with industry partners Mobius Consulting and Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), Menon and Ngac will recruit and help select students to work on actual cybersecurity projects. “They need to have taken some fundamental cyber class ahead of time,” Menon clarifies. “We want students with a commitment to the field. It allows you to get experience but it’s also competitive.”

Throughout the 12-week projects, students will receive mentoring both from the industry participant and from business faculty. “We run it in an agile scrum-like manner,” Ngac says. “Every week, we ask ‘What did you do?’ ‘What are you going to do?’ ‘What are the challenges that are impacting your work?’” If students run into trouble, faculty mentors can work with industry managers to help them get back on track.

“We’re trying to build not just the cyber workforce but the skills as well,” Ngac says.

Menon and Ngac have developed a specialty in this type of hands-on learning, which they have dubbed the Professional Readiness Experiential Program (PREP). More than 100 Virginia-based undergraduates and 20 industry participants have participated in PREP, which includes projects funded by two Commonwealth Cybersecurity Initiative Experiential Learning grants in collaboration with Mobius and IDA.

“PREP not only focuses on cybersecurity projects, but also works on many business process improvement projects,” says Ngac. "Honors and high-performing ISOM students work on real-world projects with industry participants on identifying technical solutions to business challenges through rigorous research, modelling, analysis, quantification, risk management, implementation planning, and, at times, execution.”

The NIST award also incorporates workshops for students who are new to cybersecurity but interested in exploring it as a career option. Workshops will be launched in collaboration with Trinity Washington University (TWU), a PBI (predominantly black institution) and HSI (Hispanic-serving institution) whose College of Arts and Sciences is women-only. For a field such as cybersecurity, which continues to face diversity challenges, the participation of organizations such as TWU is essential.

“We want to bring in students who have not thought of cybersecurity as a field, because they think it’s all engineering, hacking and coding,” Menon says. The workshops will emphasize the variety of functions that are integral to the space, such as management and auditing, in addition to engineering.

Students and industry participants in the current CCI Experiential Learning Projects

“It’s not just tech, there may be creativity involved in anticipating scams and threats,” Ngac explains. “These are different things we’ll be bringing up in the workshop in terms of roleplaying what cybercriminals might do, or how someone might try to socially engineer an attack.”

Unlike a standard grant, the NIST award is structured as a cooperative agreement in which the funding agency will collaborate in shaping and delivering programs as they evolve.

“The advantage of working with NIST is that top people work there. They are the standards body, so they have seen and surveyed a lot of industry,” Menon says. He also lauds NIST’s high-level view of cybersecurity and its implications. “They’re not just looking at technology but also public policy, human factors, etc. It’s a holistic approach.”

Organizations interested in being an industry participant (whether they have cybersecurity-focused or business process improvement-focused projects) with PREP are encouraged to contact Brian Ngac.

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Costello College of Business finance professor receives coveted NSF early-career award

Greg Johnson — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 15:43:13 +0000

Costello College of Business finance professor receives coveted NSF early-career award Greg Johnson Thu, 02/22/2024 - 10:43

Jiasun Li, a recently promoted associate professor of finance at the Costello College of Business at �鶹��Ƶ, has received a prestigious CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Jiasun Li

According to the NSF website, the CAREER award is given to “early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.”

The award totals $711,679 over five years. It will support Li’s ongoing research into the organization of digital services with the rise of emerging technologies.

This project jumps off from recent developments in cloud and decentralized computing. Both technologies present radical new possibilities for off-premise digital services, as evidenced by the rise of numerous cloud service providers as well as blockchain platforms.

However, the presence of strategic incentives may undermine the smooth and reliable functioning of such systems. For example, cloud providers may opt to short-charge clients when it comes to the provision of services, if it is in their best interests to do so. Alternatively, strategic actors may also disrupt the consensus protocols governing decentralized systems.

Li proposes to tackle these problems in an interdisciplinary manner, blending tools from computer science (as the topic is inherently about digital services) and economics (since incentive analysis traditionally falls in the domain of economics). He has finely honed this approach in a series of papers applying analytical models based on economic principles to decentralized systems such as blockchain proof-of-work technologies.

The ultimate goal of Li’s project, as stated in his NSF proposal, is to “guide the efficient organization of digital services for productivity gains, and thus enhance the economic competitiveness of the United States.”

Previously, Li received individual and collaborative grants from �鶹��Ƶ’s Multidisciplinary Research Initiative, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the Ethereum Foundation, among others. He was recently named an inaugural Faculty Fellow of �鶹��Ƶ’s Institute for Digital Innovation (IDIA).

“I am extremely honored to receive an NSF CAREER Award because such grants are traditionally rare in business schools," said Li. "I really appreciate the trust NSF bestowed on me. This recognition is only possible thanks to the tremendous support and many forward-looking initiatives from �鶹��Ƶ and the Costello College of Business, as well as many colleagues across different disciplines who have inspired, guided, and elevated me over the years. I look forward to carrying out the interdisciplinary research projects under the continued support from NSF and the University/Costello College of Business.”

Ajay Vinzé, dean of the Costello College of Business, said, “This prestigious award from NSF is a fitting recognition of Jiasun’s superb/impactful research record and a proud moment for Costello College of Business--Congratulations Jiasun! As the evolution of the digital economy plays out, research like Jiasun’s project is going to provide relevant and actionable insights. I look forward with great excitement to contributions that are forthcoming.”

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Two �鶹��Ƶ professors receive NSF grant to study wearables and inclusive workplaces

Marianne Klinker — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 14:35:55 +0000

Two �鶹��Ƶ professors receive NSF grant to study wearables and inclusive workplaces Marianne Klinker Wed, 10/11/2023 - 10:35

Can wearable tech resolve the crisis of underemployment among neurodiverse individuals? A multidisciplinary �鶹��Ƶ research team is about to embark on a major study to find out.

Two �鶹��Ƶ professors have been awarded a $1.87 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop wearable technology designed to help neurodiverse individuals succeed in the workforce.

Sarah Wittman

Sarah Wittman, assistant professor of management at the School of Business, and Vivian Genaro Motti, associate professor of information sciences and technology at the College of Engineering and Computing, will carry out a series of laboratory studies as well as a field study seeking to “support job tasks with a personalized wearable design to make the future of work more inclusive and equitable for neurodiverse adults.”

Wittman and Motti’s research began with the recognition that while many neurodiverse people are eager for employment and fully capable of performing well at work, the routines, expectations, and atmosphere of the contemporary workplace do not always accommodate their needs. Business environments can present all sorts of stressors—sensory, social, organizational—that can affect the productivity and mental health of neurodiverse individuals. Therefore, the extremely high rate of unemployment (up to 85%) among neurodiverse adults should be seen as an equity issue, rather than a reflection of ability or fitness to work. Wearables can contribute to resolving these inequities, helping users adjust to difficulties in their environment by, for example, reminding them to take a short break or do breathing exercises at moments of peak stress (indicated by an increase in their heart rates).

Vivian Genaro Motti

The concept behind the grant originated in 2017, with Motti’s contribution to developing WELI, a smartwatch application designed to assist students in �鶹��Ƶ LIFE, a four-year program for neurodiverse young adults combining postsecondary coursework and employment opportunities in a supportive environment. The WELI project was funded as part of a three-year grant from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR).

After WELI showed impressive results in a field study spanning the entire 2017-18 academic year, and following NIDILRR recommendations, the research team expanded the scope of the project beyond the college campus. Motti started to investigate how such technology could be adapted for the workforce. She joined forces with Wittman, a widely published management scholar specializing in work/life transitions.

The pair set out to better understand the pain points neurodiverse individuals face at work. Supported by seed funding from the Institute for Digital Innovation (IDIA) and the work of PhD student Niloofar Kalantari, who scoured Reddit and other online forums where neurodiverse people were posting about their workplace travails. Their data analysis revealed a wide range of challenges, with a high degree of variation correlated to different types of neurodiversity (ADHD, autism spectrum, Down syndrome, etc.). This confirmed their hypothesis that a one-size-fits-all wearable solution is not viable; instead, they began to pursue interventions tailored to individual user needs and specific segments of the neurodiverse population.

The four-year NSF project begins in January 2024. In the research studies planned, the PIs will recruit a large sample of adults with ADHD and those on the autism spectrum, working, for example, as stockers and order-fillers in the retail industry (or whose work might see them doing tasks with similar hand movements). Through a series of laboratory experiments, Motti and Wittman will refine the wearable technology and assess its positive impact upon both task-based performance and user well-being. Finally, they will launch a three-week field study intended to “test real-world efficacy and build guidelines around work times, tasks, and spaces for this technology”.

Beyond making life easier for neurodiverse individuals in the workplace, Motti and Wittman believe that their interventions will generate useful data for fuelling the ongoing push for more inclusive working environments. If successful, their wearable application will conclusively demonstrate the immense value that neurodiverse individuals bring to the labor force, while educating future researchers and employers on how best to foster inclusive work environments that can unlock that value for the benefit of all.

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Do you criticize or celebrate your colleagues? It may depend on your social position

Marianne Klinker — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 14:49:21 +0000

Do you criticize or celebrate your colleagues? It may depend on your social position Marianne Klinker Wed, 09/27/2023 - 10:49

Online technology has made real-time performance feedback a workplace reality. But a pair of �鶹��Ƶ professors have found out about a major bias in the system.

Online technology is fundamentally reshaping employee evaluations. In the last decade or so, companies such as IBM, Amazon, and General Electric have adopted performance feedback apps that allow employees to "review" one another in real time. These apps take the 360-degree paradigm to its logical extreme by removing temporal, hierarchical, and geographical barriers to feedback.

According to Mariia Petryk, assistant professor of information systems and operations management (ISOM) at �鶹��Ƶ School of Business, “People are trying to tap into new sources of employee engagement across all management and employment tiers. For millennials and Gen Z, instant communication is the norm, and they are not going to wait a year to get feedback. They want to know how they perform here and now, and be able to comment on other people’s performance in the same way. So when we merge these trends of social connectedness, instant communication, and use of technology, we come up with this wonderful application.”

As with any breakthrough technology, though, appropriate use of real-time performance feedback depends upon understanding its inherent limitations. After all, increasing the scale and speed of feedback is not guaranteed to erase deep-seated biases based upon gender, race, hierarchical position, etc. In a recent paper for Information Systems Research, Petryk and her ISOM colleague Siddharth Bhattacharya, concentrate on a relatively neglected—but, as it turns out, subtly powerful—category of bias related to how individuals are embedded within the informal (i.e. social) network of the organization.

Mariia Petryk (left) and Siddharth Bhattacharya

Their co-authors were Michael Rivera and Subodha Kumar of Temple University, and Liangfei Qiu of University of Florida.

Working from a unique data-set from technology provider DevelapMe, comprising nearly 4,000 instances of real-time performance feedback spanning five organizations, the researchers mapped the informal networks of each organization. They then compared reviews submitted by employees who were positionally embedded—i.e. those who moved in influential circles, though they may not themselves have been high-ranking—to ones by those who were structurally embedded, meaning they had larger clusters of weak ties.

For millennials and Gen Z, instant communication is the norm, and they are not going to wait a year to get feedback. They want to know how they perform here and now, and be able to comment on other people’s performance in the same way.

For example, both a C-level executive and their assistant could be considered positionally embedded. A middle manager whose work touches multiple teams would be structurally embedded.

The professors found that positionally embedded employees tended to give higher scores to colleagues, while structurally embedded employees skewed negative in their ratings.

Bhattacharya says, “Informal network bias could be explained as a matter of perspective. From atop the hierarchy, it’s difficult to see how projects came together and who made what happen. Positionally embedded people have a coarse rather than a granular view. Therefore, they may give highly visible individuals more credit than they deserve for collaborative work—for example, they may wrongly assume that a team member chosen to present a project to them was primarily responsible for said project.

By contrast, structurally embedded employees have wider and more diverse networks and thus a much broader base of comparison. This makes them prone to detect and emphasize the flaws of co-workers.”

Organizations using feedback apps such as DevelapMe can usually set limits on the number of anonymous reviews they allow, although the identities of anonymous raters are always visible to HR and senior leadership. The researchers found that anonymity magnified informal network bias for both structurally embedded and positionally embedded employees.

Further, since reviews included both numerical score and explanatory text, the researchers analyzed how informal network bias influenced the wording of reviews. They saw that positionally embedded raters, though more generous with their numerical rating, were relatively neutral and formal in their written feedback. Structurally embedded reviews exhibited the opposite pattern: Comparatively strict in their scoring, but positive and encouraging in their written content. The researchers speculate this points to contrasting motives—constructive vs. motivational—the two groups had for delivering feedback.

Easy ways to counter informal network bias, then, would be for organizations to carefully consider the amount of anonymity to permit, and for them to recommend or even require that each instance of feedback be accompanied by text.

Beyond that, Bhattacharya and Petryk suggest that companies employ a combination of training and technological refinements to help address informal network bias. For example, positionally embedded managers should be reminded to temper their reviews with a bit more objectivity—perhaps peering outside their bubble to get a more complete picture of an employee’s work. Tech providers and consultants could use tools such as social network mapping to help organizations better account for informal network bias in their employee performance data.

Petryk says, “Our data and findings show the mechanisms of how people—not necessarily high-ranking people—can have power over rewards, because at the end of the day the ratings will be factored into a formal evaluation. And bonuses will be distributed on the basis of the evaluation. How that decision is being made can be greatly impacted by the data that we analyze, and that we obtain from this network.”

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Building a 'digital twin' of the real world

Jennifer Anzaldi — Mon, 26 Sep 2022 14:02:39 +0000

Building a 'digital twin' of the real world Jennifer Anzaldi Mon, 09/26/2022 - 10:02

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Jingyuan Yang

As artificial intelligence (AI) has become more adept at anticipating people’s wants and needs, predictive algorithms have been mingled with almost everything we do digitally. When we are done watching a Netflix show, they take the liberty of queueing up the next one—they finish our sentences in Outlook and Gmail.

Jingyuan Yang

In the offline world, however, the complex and multidimensional nature of many of our most pivotal decisions defies algorithmic analysis. That is, unless AI can learn to detect how real-world contingencies, such as specifics of time and place, govern our choices.

Jingyuan Yang, an assistant professor of information systems and operations management at �鶹��Ƶ School of Business, is at the forefront of AI research that aims to crack the codes of the physical world. Her results so far point toward innovative solutions for some of the biggest societal, governmental, and business challenges we face.

Several of her papers to date investigate urban bike sharing, a “last mile” extension of public transport systems designed to coax commuters out of their cars. Some early adopters of bike sharing, such as New York City and Taiwan, have seen long-term success with the model. But elsewhere, including major Chinese cities, oversaturation has led to bicycle-flooded sidewalks or, even worse, rivers and vacant lots turning into bicycle graveyards—an environmental disaster that produced friction with local politicians.

Yang discovered that in Shanghai, part of the problem was that the distribution of bikes across the city did not match demand. Some areas had far more available bikes than riders, while in others the opposite was the case. Additionally, Shanghai’s system allowed commuters to dismount wherever they chose. This dockless model made predicting rider demand even more challenging, as bikes could be located virtually anywhere.

With a team of six other researchers[1], Yang developed a data-driven model for predicting traffic flows within dockless bike-sharing systems, based on a dataset provided by leading provider Mobike. Spanning the period February 2017-March 2018, the Mobike data contained more than 957 million riding records from nearly 315,000 shared bikes.

The research team extracted flow patterns from the data by partitioning the city and “smoothing out” areas with the lowest levels of activity. The resulting grid-like “flow matrix” carved Shanghai’s bike traffic into spatio-temporal snapshots that could be studied and compared. After clustering these based on their similarities, the researchers could construct “base matrices” that provided broader, deeper points of reference for prediction than temporal or geographic cues alone. Using the base matrix, the algorithm could identify emergent patterns in a certain area as those associated with central business districts on a rainy holiday morning and forecast bike traffic in that area over the next few hours accordingly.

Yang says she was surprised by what this technique of algorithmic mapping revealed. “There are a number of surprising factors we can discover that cannot be covered by traditional model analysis. As an example, we find that there is a slight increase in bike traffic near subway stations during rain, because people want a shorter commute,” she says.

The team tested their model against six other algorithms designed for the same purpose, to see which was the most accurate at predicting actual bike traffic flow in Shanghai. Yang’s team’s solution consistently outperformed the rest on sample datasets for regular working days, rainy working days and holidays–meaning it achieved the lowest degree of prediction error. Perfect predictions are impossible, because all sorts of irregular real-world occurrences, from auto accidents to one-off public events, can cause traffic on a given day to break with the pattern. “Really odd events, we cannot capture,” Yang says. “But the base matrix lets us capture basic trends.”

For Yang, optimizing bike sharing is part of a necessary push toward environmentally sustainable options for urban living, including fewer polluting modes of transport. “All these papers are intended to help companies go a more sustainable way and help the user to tackle the last mile in an eco-friendly manner-without waste and damage to the environment.”

With some tweaks to the logic, however, the same AI-based methods can apply to a range of pressing business issues. The territory mapped by algorithms need not be geographical; researchers can also “map” a network of individuals or companies. Yang’s experiment in the field of B2B marketing is a case in point. She helped build[2] an automatic recommendation engine for marketing campaigns based on customer profiles (similar in concept to the bike-sharing base matrices) reflecting corporate affiliation as well as individual employee status. Customers from the same “region” on the grid, i.e. the same company, are treated holistically to improve recommendation quality.

“When you’re selling to a company, you’re usually dealing with a group of decision-makers who are at different buying stages," Yang explains. "To estimate buying propensity, you need to consider that they may share information. Their behavior should be considered together. Therefore, we use matrix representation to extract their shared knowledge.”

One of Yang’s current research projects focuses on predicting employee flow within networks of companies, again borrowing spatio-temporal techniques. Similar to Shanghai’s urban environment, the job-hopping professional grid has its own version of “weather”—favorable or gloomy economic conditions – that may alter the pattern.

“Based on different job positions, you can group the companies. You can aggregate company profiles and predict, collectively, how many people will leave based on the stock price,” she says.

Yang’s research suggests that by building a chessboard-like “digital twin” of the real world, spatio-temporal AI solutions can help business and society predict–and thus prevent–harmful losses such as human capital flight and damage to the natural environment.

[1] Jingjing Gu, Qiang Zhou and Yanchao Zhao (of Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics), Yanchi Lui and Hui Xiong (of Rutgers University), Fuzhen Zhuang (of Chinese Academy of Sciences)

[2] In collaboration with Chuanren Liu (of Drexel University), Mingfai Teng and Hui Xiong (of Rutgers University) and Ji Chen (Google).

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Impact Fall 2023

At the frontiers of public health

Jennifer Anzaldi — Tue, 16 Aug 2022 11:54:21 +0000

At the frontiers of public health Jennifer Anzaldi Tue, 08/16/2022 - 07:54

In This Story

Ajay Vinzé

Dean Ajay Vinzé

As we all now know from bitter experience, there’s more to proper pandemic response than pills and vaccines. Medical authorities must identify potential hot spots before widespread infection becomes manifest, through early-detection methods such as wastewater testing. With these warning signals, health departments can take preventive action – lockdowns, school closures, etc. – to stop the spread. To build the systems that can make this possible, skilled epidemiologists need to work side-by-side with data scientists who can help them crunch the numbers and predict possible outcomes of various interventions.

Long before COVID was a household word, Dr. Ajay Vinzé, now dean of �鶹��Ƶ’s business school, helped pioneer just such a collaboration with public-health officials in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and is the fourth-largest county in the United States by population. Vinzé calls this nearly decade-long partnership “a major part of my research and professional journey.”

According to Vinzé, the collaboration began in late 2002 with a missed flight in the Dallas airport. He found himself sitting next to another Phoenix-bound traveler, and the two struck up a conversation. At the time, Vinzé was an associate professor at W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University researching artificial intelligence applications for business problem-solving, including how viruses spread on computer networks, in close collaboration with companies such as Intel and IBM. One of his ongoing research projects focused on failure analysis and failure identification (FA/FI). As Vinzé described his work, his impromptu travel companion – who, as it turned out, was Jonathan Weisbuch, then Director and chief health officer for the Maricopa Department of Public Health – listened closely, asked pertinent questions, and finally invited Vinzé to sit down with a group of leading Arizona epidemiologists.

Why would a top health officer for Arizona’s largest county want his colleagues to listen to an information systems professor? Because Weisbuc recognized that, as Vinzé says, “Computer networks are similar to human systems. Failure means not being able to detect early on that certain propagation is imminent. That’s the same thing you do in computer security.” The two fields also share basic preventive principles and best practices. “To inoculate yourself against viruses on the computer, you need to know the characteristics of the virus, how it spreads, and what happens after infection … and pertinent policy to control the same. Same thing for humans!”

Sarah Santana, Maricopa’s director of epidemiology, found common cause with Vinzé, enlisting him and his colleagues in her department’s efforts to refine post-9/11 surveillance protocols for handling the threat of bio-terrorism. Their work together ultimately led to an article in Information Systems Frontiers (co-authored by Minu Ipe and T.S. Raghu) examining the parallels between “information supply chains”, e.g. Arizona’s state-wide MEDSIS online public-health surveillance network, and e-commerce platforms such as Amazon. In both cases, so-called “information intermediaries” can play a vital role including, but not limited to, aligning incentives and reducing information asymmetry among multiple stakeholders. The paper details how Arizona’s public health department acted as intermediary, paving the way for Maricopa County to join the state-wide system instead of managing its own data independently.

Vinzé gives Santana immense credit for her foresight and openness in allowing ideas imported from business research into public-health emergency preparedness and response. In turn, Santana introduced Vinzé to contexts and questions from beyond academia that widened the aperture of his research lens.

The particularities of the human organism, after all, rarely enter into information systems research but are pivotal to the success of public-health initiatives. Vinzé observes that this comes into play when deciding on key metrics: “How do you attribute value to saving one human life?” The human element also brings a host of contingencies and complications that aren’t salient when dealing with machines.

Vinzé’s gradual coming-to-grips with these intricacies culminated in a 2012 paper for ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems (co-authored by Hina Arora and T.S. Raghu) modeling dynamic interactions between disease transmission, pharmaceutical interventions (e.g. vaccines), and policy-based interventions (e.g. school closures). “It’s a rich simulation exercise – we built the system and turned it over to the county,” Vinzé explains. Using actual characteristics from the 2009 H1N1 pandemic as a test case for various policy approaches, the mathematical model generated numerous insights for guiding public-health policymakers not just in Maricopa and the southwest United States, but perhaps worldwide. For example, the simulation showed that rolling school closures of two to four weeks were not only less effective at reducing transmission than county-wide, eight-week closures – but they also resulted in more weeks of shutdown over the length of the pandemic. Additionally, the results reinforced the researchers’ intuition that the quality of pandemic response hinges upon finding the right mix of pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions. Years later, these data-driven principles would be put to the ultimate test during the COVID pandemic.

Over the course of his long collaboration with Santana and the Maricopa health authorities, Vinzé got the chance to view public-health challenges from virtually every angle. “We did survey research for them, sometimes experimental research, sometimes systems-building,” he says. He even served on a healthcare-focused working group as part of the planning process for Super Bowl XLII (2008), and subsequently Super Bowl XLIX (2015) both held in Glendale, Arizona. In 2012, Vinzé was recognized with a Faculty Achievement Award from Arizona State University for “defining edge research and creative work for professional application” recognizing high impact research over a ten-year period – his association with public health was acknowledged as a main driver of impact.

In hindsight, Vinzé suggests that his foray into public health spotlights and clarifies certain aspects of digital transformation. He points out that technological advancement comes in waves, producing sudden surges in computing power, processing speed and data accessibility. With each wave, public- and private-sector actors alike experience a tidal force of opportunity (for leaders) or adversity (for laggards). Collaborations between academia, business and government can help translate technological evolution into positive outcomes for the economy, communities and the wider society.

“Each wave has an implication on the workforce of that time. We’re going through this big wave as we speak, coming out of COVID. The question is, are we ready?” Vinzé says.

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