讲座题目：Where is Popular Next? Forecasting Contagious Social Foci in Two-mode Social Networks

　　主讲人：Zhepeng (Lionel) Li, Schulich School of Business, York University

　　讲座地点：经济与管理学院B226

　　讲座时间：2017年4月27日(周四)下午15:30-17：00

　　主办单位：管理科学与工程系、武汉大学经济与管理学院“商业大数据驱动下的管理创新研究”学术团队

　　讲座摘要：Adoption and social contagion studies have been focused on using homogeneous social networks. We distinguish two types of social entities: social actors and social foci by using two-mode social network. Based on relevant theories, we identify and operationalize factors that drive social contagion. Interdependences between social actors and social foci are captured by a mutual reinforcement model. We formulate the problem of forecasting contagious social foci and propose to address it using a gradient-based mutual reinforcement learning (GMRL) method. The optimal parameters for the predictive model are obtained via supervised learning from data. Empirical evaluations are extensively conducted using real-world data sets from popular location-based social networking platforms.

　　主讲人简介：Zhepeng (Lionel) Li currently serves as an assistant professor of Operations Management and Information Systems at the Schulich School of Business, York University at Toronto, Canada. He has received his PhD in Information Systems with a minor in Computer Science, from School of Business, University of Utah, USA.

　　His research interests broadly lie in the (large-scale) data-driven business analytics area. Topical streams include recommendations, social adoption, network formation, healthcare analytics, financial analytics, and distributed data mining & privacy protection. Zhepeng’s study is dedicated to addressing relevant business, and managerial questions from technical and/or quantitative perspectives. His works have been published at top-tier journals such as Management Science (MS) and Information Systems Research (ISR). His research has also been covered by MIT Technology Review and mass media such as Yahoo! News, etc.

　　As for recognitions, Zhepeng is awarded with the INFORMS ISS Design Science Research Award, 2016. His works have been funded by agencies such as Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Discovery Grant of Canada, 2017-2022, and National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), 2017-2020.