Faculty
Bin Zhu
Associate Professor of Business Analytics, Director of Center for Business Analytics and Applied AI
Business Analytics

Bin Zhu

541-737-1803

bin.zhu@bus.oregonstate.edu

Faculty
Bin Zhu
Overview
Overview
Background
Publications

Overview

Career Interests

Dr. Bin Zhu is an Associate Professor of Business Information Systems in the College of Business. Prior to OSU she was an assistant professor at Boston University. She earned her Ph.D. in Management Information Systems from University of Arizona. Her current research interests include business intelligence, information analysis, social network, human-computer interaction, information visualization, computer-mediated communication, and knowledge management systems. She has been a lead author for papers that have appeared in Information Systems Research, Decision Support Systems, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, IEEE Transaction on Image Processing, and D-Lib Magazine. Her research also received an IBM faculty award.  Her teaching interests are business intelligence; database analysis and design; telecommunication; web technology; business programming; data structure and algorithms; e-commerce; information security/assurance; management information systems.

Background

Education

Ph.D. in Management  Information Systems, Minor in Computer Science, May 2002
Management Information Systems Department
Eller College of Management
University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721

M.S. Atmospheric Science, May 1997
Department of Atmospheric Science
University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721

B.S. Meteorology, July 1989
Department of Geophysics
Beijing University, Beijing, China

Experience

  • Associate Professor, Business Information Systems - September 2014-present, College of Business, Oregon State University
  • Assistant Professor, Business Information Systems - September 2011-2014, College of Business, Oregon State University
  • Assistant Professor, IS Department - July 2002-2011, School of Management, Boston University
  • Research Associate, Department of Management Information Systems, University of Arizona - August 1997-2002
  • Research Assistant, Atmospheric Science Department,  University of Arizona - 1994-1997
  • Associate Director of Information Systems, Chengdu Bureau of Meteorology, Chengdu, Sichuan, P.R. China - 1992-1994
  • Weather Forecaster, Chengdu Bureau of Meteorology, Chengdu, Sichuan, P.R. China - 1989-1992

Professional Affiliations

  • Association of Computing Machinery (ACM)
  • Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
  • Association for Information Systems (AIS)

Honors & Awards

  • Best paper nomination, International Conference on Information Quality 2008, Boston, MA
  • IBM Faculty Research Award, Amount: $40k, 2003
  • Junior Faculty Research Fund, School of Management, Boston University, 2003-2004 , 2005-2006, 2006-2007, and 2008-2010
  • Doctoral Consortium, Annual ACM CHI (Computer Human Interaction) Conference: Human Factors in Computing Systems, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2002
  • Graduate College Fellowship of University of Arizona, 1999-2000
  • Graduate Registration Scholarship, Department of Management Information Systems, University of Arizona, 1999-2002

Publications

Conference
Business Analytics

“Helping Senior Participants Acquire the Right Type of Social Support in Online Communities”

Senior citizens could greatly be benefited from the social support received from a community (Choi et al. 2014; Goswami et al. 2010). Social support denotes to the interaction/communication with others, verbal or nonverbal, reducing the uncertainty or enhancing the self-perception of in control of one’s own life (Albrecht and Adelman 1987). All participants of online communities are motivated by their desire of seeking social support. And such support occurs when community members form relational links among them and have interactions that intend to help (Heaney and Israel 2002). A network member can receive/send different types of social supports from/to others. Informational support transmits information and provides guidance related to the task/question a community member has (Krause 1986); emotional support expresses understanding, encouragement, empathy affection, affirming, validation, sympathy, caring and concern (House 1981; Wang et al. 2014); companionship or network support gives the recipient a sense of belonging (Keating 2013; Wang et al. 2014); and appraisal support enhances the self-evaluation of the recipient (House 1981). Studies have shown that people are usually motivated by their desire of seeking one or more types of social supports to participate in an online community (Goswami et al. 2010; Kanayama 2003; Pfeil 2007; Pfeil and Zaphiris 2009; Wright 2000; Xie 2008). And such social support can only be acquired during the interaction with others. For senior citizens, even though they can be greatly benefited from the social support received through participation, the obstacles they need to overcome in order to feel engaged could be larger than that of younger people (Charness and Boot 2009; Lee et al. 2011), especially when they come to the community for the first time. They could be easily overwhelmed by the content that has been generated by other existing members, finding it difficult to identify an appropriate member to initiate a meaningful interaction. It therefore is critical for an online community system to help senior participants identify other existing members who are more likely to supply the type of support they are seeking. While many previous studies have uncovered the variety factors, contextual (Pfeil and Zaphiris 2009; Wang et al. 2015; Xie 2008) or individual (Wang et al. 2014, 2015, 2012; Wright 1999), that impact the degree to which a senior citizen receives social support needed from an online community, it remains unclear what the characteristics of existing community members who are more likely to provide a new comer the kind of support, informational, emotional, companionship, or appraisal are. And the answer to this question may have significant academic and practical implications. This study thus proposes to fulfil the gap by utilizing data collected from a senior community website to investigate the links between the characteristics of existing senior members and the amount and the type of support they provided to new comers.
Full Details

Changyu Wang, Bin Zhu and Meiyun Zuo "Helping Senior Participants Acquire the Right Type of Social Support in Online Communities" The 10th China Summer Workshop on Information Management (CSWIM 2016) 2016

Full Details
Academic Journal
Business Analytics

“The Hl-index: Improvement of H-index Based on Quality of Citing Papers”

This paper proposes hl-index as an improvement of the h-index, a popular measurement for the research quality of academic researchers. Although the h-index integrates the number of publications and the academic impact of each publication to evaluate the productivity of a researcher, it assumes that all papers that cite an academic article contribute equally to the academic impact of this article. This assumption, of course, could not be true in most times. The citation from a well-cited paper certainly brings more attention to the article than the citation from a paper that people do not pay attention to. It therefore becomes important to integrate the impact of papers that cite a researcher’s work into the evaluation of the productivity of the researcher. Constructing a citation network among academic papers, this paper therefore proposes hl-index that integrating the h-index with the concept of lobby index, a measures that has been used to evaluate the impact of a node in a complex network based on the impact of other nodes that the focal node has direct link with. This paper also explores the characteristics of the proposed hl-index by comparing it with citations, h-index and its variant g-index.
Full Details

Li Zai, Xiangbin Yan and Bin Zhu "The Hl-index: Improvement of H-index Based on Quality of Citing Papers" Akadémiai Kiadó and Springer Science+Business Media Akadémiai Kiadó and Springer Science+Business Media 1021-1031 pages 2014 View on: Google Scholar

Full Details
Conference
Business Analytics

“Gender Classification for Product Reviewers in China: A Data-Driven Approach”

While it is crucial for organizations to automatically identify the gender of participants in product discussion forums, they may have difficulties adopting existing gender classification methods because the associations between the linguistic features used in those studies and gender type usually varies with context. The prototype system we propose to demo validates a framework for the development of gender classification that uses a more “data-driven” approach. It constantly extracts content-specific features from the discussion content. And the system could automatically adjust itself to accommodate the contextual changes in order to achieve better classification accuracy.
Full Details

Bin Zhu, Xiangbin Yan and Jing Wang "Gender Classification for Product Reviewers in China: A Data-Driven Approach" Proceedings of 23rd Workshop on Information Technology and Systems (WITS'2013) 2013

Full Details
Conference
Business Analytics

“A cognitive-neural approach to explaining market oscillations in a fully recurrent adaptive agent population”

Recreating market oscillations to study the markets often makes use of induced activity reversal via finite share or auction thresholds, strategically replacing agents via bankruptcy or genetic algorithm rules, heavily data specific network parameterization, or stochastic randomness. However, such techniques do not shed any additional light on how and why intelligent individual scale agents may spontaneously and rationally decide to endogenously change from a buying to a selling posture within a population. This paper introduces Social Netmap, an agent based population of general purpose, parameter-free, adaptive agents adjusting their behavior in real time to the directly observed aggregate and individual behaviors of their neighbors much like real intelligent actors might in a population. Without relying on random processes, validated parameters, turning-point thresholds, or agent replacement, Social Netmap was able to endogenously create typical market oscillations in 21 out of 30 cases of real Dow Jones Industrial Average data. Social Netmap points towards future work in more realistic group behavior of intelligent, rational agents.
Full Details

Charles Wong, Massimiliano Versace and Bin Zhu "A cognitive-neural approach to explaining market oscillations in a fully recurrent adaptive agent population" 2013

Full Details
Academic Journal
Business Analytics

“An ACP Approach to Public Health Emergency Management: Using a Campus Outbreak of H1N1 Influenza as a Case Study”

In order to tackle the infeasibility of building mathematical models and conducting physical experiments for public health emergencies in a real world, we apply the ACP (Artificial societies, Computational experiments, and Parallel execution) approach to public health emergency management. We conducted a case study on the largest collective outbreak of H1N1 influenza at a Chinese university in 2009. We built an artificial society to reproduce H1N1 influenza outbreaks. In computational experiments, aiming to obtain comparable results with the real data, we applied the same intervention strategy as that was used during the real outbreak. Then we compared experiment results with real data to verify our models, including spatial models, population distribution, weighted social networks, contact patterns, students’ behaviors, and models of H1N1 influenza disease, in the artificial society. We then applied alternative intervention strategies to the artificial society. The simulation results suggested that alternative strategies controlled the outbreak of H1N1 influenza more effectively. Our models and their application to intervention strategy improvement show that the ACP approach is useful for public health emergency management
Full Details

Wei Duan, Zhidong Cao, Youzhong Wang, Bin Zhu, Daniel Zeng, Fei-Yue Wang, Xiaogang Qiu, Hongbin Song and Yong Wang "An ACP Approach to Public Health Emergency Management: Using a Campus Outbreak of H1N1 Influenza as a Case Study" IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part A: Systems & Humans 1028-1041 pages 2013 View on: Google Scholar

Full Details