Host: Research

Hear from David Schweidel, Professor of Marketing at Emory University at his talk “Opportunities with Text Data” during our Research Speaker Series

Abstract

Companies are increasingly investing resources in content marketing, trying to attract and retain customers by generating engaging content. The majority of data produced by both consumers and firms is unstructured. The availability of such data offers marketers with new opportunities that will be explored in this talk. First, a mixed method investigation of what makes content appealing will be presented. Using data from more than 600,000 reading sessions of more than 35,000 articles, we investigate the language that is associated with content that sustains readers’ attention. The results from this multi-method approach suggest that emotion plays an important role; but rather than simply being driven by emotionality, or valence, they are driven by the particular appraisal and action tendencies associated with different emotions, with anger and anxiety related language encouraging sustained attention while sad language discourages it. Second, an empirical investigation will be presented into the role of audience composition on social media engagement, using Twitter activity from U.S. Senators at the start of the Trump administration as our empirical context. Taken together, this talk aims to highlight the opportunities for researchers in leveraging textual data.

About Dr. Schweidel

David A. Schweidel is a Professor of Marketing at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. Schweidel received his B.A. in mathematics, M.A. in statistics, and Ph.D. in marketing from the University of Pennsylvania. He was previously on the faculty of the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. Schweidel is an expert in the areas of customer relationship management and social media analytics. His research has appeared in leading business journals including Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science and Management Science. Schweidel is the author of Social Media Intelligence (Cambridge University Press) in which he and his co-author discuss how organizations can leverage social media data to inform their marketing strategies. He is also the author of Profiting from the Data Economy (Pearson FT Press), in which he details the value of businesses tapping into consumer data for both individuals and companies.

Join Steve Buchheit for his SEiR-F Talk.

The Summer Excellence in Research Program for Faculty (SEiR-F) promotes high-quality research efforts for Culverhouse faculty by providing funding for their summer research. Funds may be taken as a summer stipend and/or used to reduce the costs of the proposed research.

Abstract

Coming soon.

Join Peter Brummund for his SEiR-F Talk.

The Summer Excellence in Research Program for Faculty (SEiR-F) promotes high-quality research efforts for Culverhouse faculty by providing funding for their summer research. Funds may be taken as a summer stipend and/or used to reduce the costs of the proposed research.

Abstract

Coming soon.

Join Lei Kong for his SEiR-F Talk.

The Summer Excellence in Research Program for Faculty (SEiR-F) promotes high-quality research efforts for Culverhouse faculty by providing funding for their summer research. Funds may be taken as a summer stipend and/or used to reduce the costs of the proposed research.

Abstract

Coming soon.

Phebe Vayanos of The University of Southern California will be speaking on designing robust, interpretable, and fair social and public health interventions.

Designing Robust, Interpretable, and Fair Social and Public Health Interventions

In the last decades, significant advances have been made in AI, ML, and optimization. Recently, systems relying on these technologies are being transitioned to the field with the potential of having tremendous influences on people and society. With an increase in the scale and diversity of deployment of algorithm-driven decisions in the open world come several challenges including the need for robustness, interpretability, and fairness which are confounded by issues of data scarcity and bias, tractability, ethical considerations, and problems of shared responsibility between humans and algorithms.

In this talk, we focus on the problems of homelessness and public health in low resource and vulnerable communities and present research advances in AI, ML, and optimization to address one key cross-cutting question: how to allocate scarce intervention resources in these domains while accounting for the challenges of open-world deployment? We will show concrete improvements over the state of the art in these domains based on real-world data. We are convinced that, by pushing this line of research, AI, ML, and optimization can play a crucial role to help fight injustice and solve complex problems facing our society.

About Phebe Vayanos

Phebe Vayanos is an Assistant Professor of Industrial & Systems Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Southern California. She is also an Associate Director of CAIS, the Center for Artificial Intelligence in Society, an interdisciplinary research initiative between the schools of Engineering and Social Work at USC. Her research is focused on Operations Research and Artificial Intelligence and in particular on optimization and machine learning. Her work is motivated by problems that are important for social good, such as those arising in public housing allocation, public health, and biodiversity conservation.

Prior to joining USC, she was a lecturer in the Operations Research and Statistics Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a postdoctoral research associate in the Operations Research Center at MIT. She holds a Ph.D. degree in Operations Research and an MEng degree in Electrical & Electronic Engineering, both from Imperial College London. She served as a member of the ad hoc INFORMS AI Strategy Advisory Committee and is an elected member of the Committee on Stochastic Programming (COSP). She is a recipient of the INFORMS Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Ambassador Program Award.

Dr. Utku Unver from Boston College joins the Research Speaker Series on April 9th, 2021 to present on the ethics of COVID-19 vaccinations.

Abstract

COVID-19 has revealed limitations of existing mechanisms for rationing medical resources under emergency scenarios. Many argue that these mechanisms abandon various ethical values such as equity by discriminating against disadvantaged communities. Illustrating that these limitations are aggravated by a restrictive choice of mechanism, we formulate pandemic rationing of medical resources as a new application of market design and propose a reserve system as a resolution. We develop a general theory of reserve design, introduce new concepts such as cutoff equilibria and smart reserves, extend analysis of previously-known ones such as sequential reserve matching, relate these concepts to current debates, and present preliminary policy impact.

About Utku Unver

Utku Ünver is a professor of economics at Boston College.  He received his Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Pittsburgh in 2000. His first appointments were as an assistant professor at Koç University in Istanbul (2000-2005) and at his alma mater, the University of Pittsburgh (2005-2008). He moved to Boston College in 2008 and has been a full professor there since 2011.

He is an economic theorist, with research interests broadly in market and mechanism design, game theory, and in their practical & theoretical applications in matching markets, such as the design of living-donor organ exchanges, axiomatic matching mechanism design, and recently allocation of scarce medical resources. He has been one of the initiators of the market design research on kidney exchange. He has helped the launching and operation of the first two kidney-exchange clearinghouses in the world founded upon economic principles, the New England Program for Kidney Exchange, and the Alliance for Kidney Paired Donation. He published around 45 articles, including in all top-five and leading field journals of economics and in top journals of other disciplines, such as medicine, operations research, and marketing science.

He is on the editorial boards of several journals, including Theoretical Economics, Journal of Economic Theory, and Games and Economic Behavior. He was the President of the Society for Economic Design between 2008-2015.

Join Xiaochun Liu for his SEiR-F Talk.

The Summer Excellence in Research Program for Faculty (SEiR-F) promotes high-quality research efforts for Culverhouse faculty by providing funding for their summer research. Funds may be taken as a summer stipend and/or used to reduce the costs of the proposed research.

Abstract

Coming soon.

Join Stacey Robinson for his SEiR-F Talk.

The Summer Excellence in Research Program for Faculty (SEiR-F) promotes high-quality research efforts for Culverhouse faculty by providing funding for their summer research. Funds may be taken as a summer stipend and/or used to reduce the costs of the proposed research.

Abstract

Coming soon.