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An Overview
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What
am I doing for my PhD?
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I am working with Prof. Anindya Ghose and Prof. Panagiotis G. Ipeirotis in the
Center for Digital Economy Research
(CeDER). Broadly speaking,
my research specialty concentrates on studying the
economics of information technology using inter-disciplinary
approaches combining econometrics, economic structural
modeling, Bayesian modeling and randomized field
experiments, with crowd-sourcing and machine learning
techniques like text mining, sentiment analysis
and image classification. I
am most interested in topics related to online social
media and search engine marketing. Some examples
of reserach questions I am looking at are
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How do consumers search, evaluate and purchase
products based on information acquired from
search engines and social media? |
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How do today's product search mechanisms and
social media platforms affect consumers' behavior
and the subsequent economic outcome in the market? |
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How to leverage knowledge created within and
across a large diversity of social media channels,
in order to improve the product search mechanism
to increase market efficiency and social welfare? |
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How can I translate my research into real world
applications? |
More
specifically, my PhD dissertation research concentrates
on the following three areas:
First,
I empirically demonstrate that using consumer utility
theory to build a structural econometric model of
demand estimation provides a more precise framework
for driving e-commerce search compared to existing
models on search engines that typically rely on
theories of document relevance and other reduced-form
econometric approaches. To achieve the goal, I combine
random-coefficient structural model for demand estimation,
machine learning techniques such as text mining
and image classification, randomized field experiments
and crowd-sourcing analysis. On
a broader note, the objective of this stage is to
illustrate how social media on the Internet can
be mined (to learn latent product information) and
incorporated into a demand estimation model, and
how social media can be leveraged to generate a
new ranking system in product search engines to
improve the quality of choices available to consumers
online. Besides providing consumers with direct
economic gains, such a ranking system can lead to
non-trivial reduction in consumer search costs and
increased usage of product search engines. The
first paper from my dissertation is published in
Marketing Science. In addition,
a related paper won the Best
Paper Award at the 20th International
World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2011).
Second,
I examine how different ranking and personalization
mechanisms on product search engines influence consumer
online search and purchase behavior. To investigate
these effects, I combine archival data analysis
with randomized field experiments. In the archival
data analysis, I use a hierarchical Bayesian model
to jointly estimate the relationship among consumer
click and purchase behavior, and search engine ranking
decisions. To evaluate the causal effect of search
engine interface on user behavior, I conduct randomized
field experiments. The field experiments are based
on the real-world hotel
search engine artifact designed and
built by ourselves. By manipulating the default
ranking method of search results, and by enabling
or disabling a variety of personalization features
on the hotel search engine website, I am able to
empirically identify the causal impact of search
engines on consumers' online click and purchase
behavior. A related
working paper
on this topic will be presented at WISE 2011.
Third,
I further examine how consumers search, evaluate
and purchase products online. Especially I am interested
in consumers' dynamic behavior and strategic actions
on product search engines. In particular, this step
allows me to more precisely identify consumer preferences
not only from the final choices made through the
search engines, but also from the entire online
search history that leads to the final decisions.
Moreover, I am interested to extend this study to
a social network setting, and examine how social
dynamics may influence consumer search and how social
signals can be incorporated into product search
engine design. To achieve the goal, I plan to use
a dynamic structural model considering customers'
forward-looking behavior. The dynamic model enables
me to predict the consumer satisfaction in a sense
that it extracts the net utility of a product after
taking into account the screen position bias, consumer
heterogeneity, search cost and social dynamics.
I am
going to the ICIS 2011 Doctoral Consortium. For
more details on my PhD research, a short version
of my dissertation proposal can be found here.
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Machine Learning:
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Previously, I also worked
on projects related to US housing market analysis
and forecast, medical image mining for early Alzheimer's
Disease diagnose, and blog text mining.
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Projects
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WCAI-Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative Research Opportunity for "Examining the Synergetic Effects among Multi-Channel Branding Campaigns."
2012-2013. (with Foster Provost, Ori Stitelman, and Brian Dalessandro)
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MSI-Wharton Interactive Media Initiative Grant for "The
Economic Impact of User-Generated Content: Combining Text
mining with Demand Estimation in the Hotel Industry."
2009-2010.
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Microsoft Virtual Earth Award.,
Aug. 2007- May. 2008.
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The EconoMining
Project @ NYU, Aug. 2007- 2010.
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Brain image classification for early Alzheimer's Disease
detection, Jan 2006-May 2007.
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Blog text mining, Nov 2006-May 2007.
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Publications
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Extracting
Economic Value from Online User-Generated Content: Combining
Text Mining with Demand Estimation in the Hotel Industry.
In Proceedings of the 32nd
INFORMS Marketing Science Conference, Cologne, Germany,
June 2010. (with Anindya Ghose and Panagiotis G. Ipeirotis)
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Enhancing Clustering Blog Documents by Utilizing Author/Reader
Comments. In Proceedings of the 45th ACM
Southeast Conference (ACMSE 2007), pp.94-99, March 23-24,
2007, Winston-Sale, North Carolina (with Shuting
Xu and Jun Zhang)
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Workshops
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Examining
the Impact of Search Engine Ranking and Personalization on Consumer
Behavior: Combining Bayesian Modeling with Randomized Field
Experiments. Workshop on Information Systems
and Economics (WISE 2011), Shanghai, December, 2011. (With Anindya Ghose and Panagiotis G. Ipeirotis)
Mining User-Generated and Crowd-Sourced
Content on the Internet to Estimate Demand for Hotels. The Sixth Symposium on Statistical
Challenges in Electronic Commerce Research (SCECR 2010). Austin,
TX, June 2010. (With Anindya Ghose and Panagiotis G. Ipeirotis)
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The Economic Impact of User-Generated
Content on the Internet: Combining Text Mining with Demand Estimation
in the Hotel Industry.. Workshop on Information Systems and Economics
(WISE 2009), Phoenix, December, 2009. (with Anindya
Ghose and Panagiotis
G. Ipeirotis)
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Stay Elsewhere? The Economic
Impact of Location-based Hotel Features: A View from Remote
Sensing Image Analysis. Winter Conference
on Business Intelligence, March, 2008, Salt Lake City, Utah.
(with Anindya Ghose
and Panagiotis G. Ipeirotis)
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Awards
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WCAI-Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative Research Opportunity for "Examining the Synergetic Effects among Multi-Channel Branding Campaigns." 2012-2013. (with Foster Provost, Ori Stitelman, and Brian Dalessandro)
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ICIS
Doctoral Consortium 2011, invited
participant, Shanghai, China. Dec. 2011.
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Best
Paper Award,
World
Wide Web Conference 2011(WWW2011), Hyderabad, India.
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Invited participant for the Columbia-Duke-UCLA Workshop
on Quantitative Marketing and Structural Econometrics
(QuantCamp). Duke University,
Auguest, 2010.
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PhD Student Travel Support Fellowship,
Stern School of Business, NYU, 2009-2010. |
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Doctoral Student Fellowship, Leonard
N. Stern School of Business, New York University, Sept.
2008-present. |
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Student Travel Support from Graduate
School Fellowship of University of Kentucky, Spring, 2007. |
Best
Paper Award,
20th Annual EKU Symposium in the Mathematical, Statistical
and Computer Sciences, Mar 31, 2006.
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Editor's Choice Award for Outstanding
Achievement in Poetry, International Library of Poetry,
July 2006. |
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Seventeen other Fellowships and Awards
in my B.S/M.S study in China, 1999-2005. |
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Talks,
Demonstrations, and others
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Towards a Theory Model for Product
Search. Baidu
Inc. Beijing, China, June 2011.
A Demo Search Engine for Products.
WWW 2011. March 2011.
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Designing Ranking Systems for Hotels
on Travel Search Engines by Mining User-Generated and
Crowd-Sourced Content. 6th bi-annual Conference
on The Economics of Intellectual Property, Software and
the Internet. Toulouse, France, January 2011.
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A Demo for Product Search. Day
1: Technology Expo, NYU. November 2010.
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Designing Ranking Systems for Hotels
on Travel Search Engines by Mining User-Generated and
Crowd-Sourced Content.
The 10th Anniversary for Department of Information,
Operations & Management Science (IOMS), Stern
School of Business, NYU. October 29th, 2010.
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Designing Ranking Systems for Hotels
on Travel Search Engines. New York Computer Science
and Economics Day. The New York Academy of Sciences,
World Trade Center, New York, NY. 2009, 2010.
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Stay Elsewhere? Improving Local Search
for Hotels Using Econometric Modeling and Image Classification
WebDB 2008, in conjunction
with ACM SIGMOD/PODS 2008
, Vancouver, Canada.
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Local Search for Hotel and Restaurants
Using Econometrics Modeling and Image Classification. Virtual Earth
Academic Research Collaboration 2007 RFP Awards Summits. April 30 - May 1, 2008.
Redmond, Washington.
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Stay
Elsewhere? The Economic Impact of Location-based Hotel
Features: A View from Remote Sensing Image Analysis. Winter Conference on
Business Intelligence, March 20-22, 2008, Salt
Lake City, Utah.
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Enhancing
Clustering Blog Documents by Utilizing Author/Reader Comments.
Mar.
2007. North Carolina.
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Bookmarks
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