Hello! I am an Amazon Distinguished Professor, Martin Lee & Carol Fri Robinson Faculty Fellow, and Director of the Ph.D. in Business Analytics Program at the Haslam College of Business, the University of Tennessee Knoxville. I previously served as President of INFORMS College on Artificial Intelligence, a section of INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences).

My research spans artificial intelligence and knowledge engineering, and is currently organized around three themes: (1) advancing natural language processing (NLP), customer analytics, and knowledge integration through graph neural networks (GNN); (2) developing causal, interpretable, and fair machine learning methods that matter to business and society; and (3) applying these approaches to domains such as FinTech, healthcare, and digital platforms. I work at the intersection of machine learning and business practice, where the demands of rigorous theory often meet the realities of implementation, and where design choices, data constraints, and governance decisions directly shape business outcomes and sociotechnical risks.

My work has been published in premier journals such as Journal of Marketing, INFORMS Journal on Computing (IJOC), IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), Machine Learning, and European Journal of Operational Research (EJOR). A list of my select working papers is available here.

I hold a Ph.D. from Rutgers University and a Master's degree from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. My coauthors and I have received several distinctions, including the Best Paper Award at INFORMS Data Science 2018, the Best Student Paper Award at AOM 2017, the Best Paper Award at WAIM 2013, the Best Student Paper Runner-Up Award at KDD 2008, and the Best Paper Runner-Up Award at ICTAI 2006. I was also among the top five finalists for ACM SIGKDD Doctoral Dissertation Award in 2011.

I currently serve as an Associate Editor for the Decision Sciences Journal (DSJ) and the INFORMS Journal on Data Science (IJDS). I have served in leadership and organizational roles for various conferences, including Co-Chair for INFORMS Data Science Workshop 2021 and KDD Cup 2019, and Program Co-Chair for WITS 2021 & 2025 and SWAIB 2025 & 2026. I served several NSF review panels and numerous program committees of premier international conferences, such as KDD. I am a senior member of ACM, IEEE, and INFORMS.

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