I am a social scientist who studies how information technologies have changed the way humans interact and collaborate with one another. My current research examines human interaction and collaboration with AI algorithms and smart machines. My work has been published at many top journals and conference proceedings across disciplines of management, computer science, and information science. My research on online community design and Wikipedia collaboration was funded by National Science Foundation. I am a proud and accomplished teacher, having taught undergraduate, graduate, and executive courses on digital transformation, competing with AI, and business use of social media. I won the Carlson School Outstanding Teaching Award in 2017 and 2021 and the Carlson School Outstanding Service Award in 2023. I have been nominated by undergraduate and graduate students as the Faculty of the year many times.
Recent Updates (September 2024):​
  • Current: My Google Scholar Profile.
  • 09/2024: I received the Carlson School Global DBA Teaching Award. 
  • 03/2024: My first op-ed on Uniquely Human in the AI Era got published by MinnPost.
  • ​12/2023: My paper titled "Augmenting Human Teams with robots in Knowledge Work Settings: Insights from the Literature" co-authored with Jeff Clement has been accepted by the ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction. [PDF]
  • 10/2023: I visited the University of Wisconsin Madison Business School and presented my work on "Augmenting Human Teams with robots in Knowledge Work Settings." 
  • 09/2023: I won the Carlson School of Management Outstanding Service Award. 
  • 09/2023: I gave a talk on "Business Use of AI" at the MISRC Digital Leadership Conference. 
  • 07/2023: My paper titled "How Did They Build the Free Encyclopedia? A Literature Review of Collaboration and Coordination among Wikipedia Editors" co-authored with Haifeng Zhang and Robert Kraut has been accepted by the ACM Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction. [PDF] 
  • 06/2023: My editorial titled "Unpacking Human and AI Complementarity: Insights from Recent Works" co-authored with Xuefei (Nancy) Deng and K.D. Joshi is forthcoming at The DATA BASE for advances in information systems. [PDF]
 
  • 11/2022: I visited the University of Notre Dame Mendoza College of Business and presented my work on "Augmenting Human Teams with robots in Knowledge Work Settings."
  • 11/2021: I won the Carlson School Outstanding Teaching Award (my second one :-). 
  • 10/2021: Our paper titled "AI Recommendations to Support Professional Sales Decisions: A Grounded Theory Approach" and co-authored with Jeff Clement has been accepted for a poster presentation at WITS 2021. 
  • 09/2021: Our paper titled "Significance of Task Significance in Online Marketplaces for Work" co-authored with Shawn Curley has been  accepted by HICSS. 
  • 08/2021: Our paper titled "Explaining less is a better nudge? How explanations from Medical AI systems affect recommendation adoption by experts" co-authored with Jeff Clement and Shawn Curley has been accepted for presentation at CIST 2021. 
 
  • 10/2020: My student Jeff Clement won the Best Paper Award at CHITA 2020. The paper is titled Disregarding, modifying, or adopting: How medical experts incorporate AI recommendations into patient care decisions and co-authored with me and Shawn Curley. 
  • 08/2020: I will be teaching a Master-level course on Artificial Intelligence for Competitive Advantage. Here is a shorter version of the syllabus. If you are interested, email me with questions or to get the full syllabus. 
  • 07/2020: Our paper title "Engagement by Design: An Empirical Study of the “Reactions” Feature on Facebook Business Pages" has been accepted by ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction.
  • 07/2020: Our paper titled "Creating, Meta-Voicing, and Propagating: A Road Map for Understanding User Roles in Computational Advertising" has been accepted by Journal of Advertising. 
  • 07/2020: I am now a full-time Senior Editor at Organization Science (completed my Diffusion Editor role).
  • 05/2020: My student Yash Babar (co-advised with Gord) will be joining University of Wisconsin Madison as an Assistant Professor. 
 
  • 10/2019: I finished my second half marathon and achieved a new personal best at 1 hour 58 minutes 34 seconds. 
  • 09/2019: Our paper titled "Mining and Predicting Temporal Patterns in the Quality Evolution of Wikipedia Articles" is accepted by Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences 2020 (HICSS-53). 
  • 01/01/2019: I am now a member of INFORMS Publications Committee starting in 2019.
 
  • 11/6/2018: My student Mochen Yang (co-advised with Gedas) won the INFORMS ISS 2018 Nunamaker-Chen Dissertation Award.
  • 10/03/2018: Our paper titled "Understanding User-Generated Content and Customer Engagement on Facebook Business Pages" (co-authored with Mochen Yang and Gedas Adomavicius) has been accepted for publication at Information Systems Research. 
  • 08/28/2018: I visited the Marshall School of Business at University of Southern California. 
  • 08/10/18: Academy of Management Annual Conference. I participated in the Academy of Management OCIS Division Junior Faculty Consortium as a faculty mentor. My student Yash Babar presented our work on Facebook Foodie Group. My postdoc Haifeng Zhang presented our work on dynamic clustering and prediction of Wikipedia article evolution. 
  • 05/01/18: My student Mochen Yang (co-advised with Gedas) successfully defended his dissertation. He will join the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University as an Assistant Professor. Here is a photo after the graduation ceremony. Congratulations, Dr. Yang. :-)
  • 04/19/18: I visited the McComb School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. 
  • 03/13/18: I attended the Sackler Colloquim of the national Academy of Sciences on Creativity and Collaboration: Revisiting cybernetic serendipity in Washington, D.C. The new buzz word is STEAM which is STEM plus Art. 
  • 03/03/18: I attended the Organization Science Winter Conference in Park City, Utah. Had fun serving as a panelist and listening to many insightful panel presentations, especially Editor-in-Chief Gautam's comment on the importance of theory in the age of big data. 
 
  • 12/09/17: Had lots of fun organizing and running the first Paper-a-thon at ICIS 2017 with Nick and Jungpil. We had 15 teams who worked over the clock for 24 hours to put together a presentation. Amazing how much can be accomplished in 24 hours.
  • 12/06/17: I visited the Nanyang Business School at Nanyang Technological University. 
  • 11/10/17: I visited the Fox School of Business at Temple University. 
  • 10/28/17: I finished my first half marathon in 2 hours and 20 minutes. 
  • 10/02/17: I visited the School of Business at Stevens Institute of Technology. 
  • 09/25/17: I visited the Department of Management Science at the University of Waterloo. 
  • 08/19/17: My second Ragnar Relay of 200.3 miles from Winona, MN to the East Bank of University of Minnesota (my share was 12.7 miles :-). Here are some pictures of me and my Northern Star Running Team. 
  • 08/08/17: I attended the Academy of Management Annual Conference in Atlanta, GA. Very honored to receive the Organization Science Service Award. My Wikipedia research paper was nominated for the Best Conference Paper award. 
  • 06/25/17: I attended the 11th China Summer Workshop on Information Management in Nanjing, China. My paper on Wikipedia subgroup dynamics was nominated for the Best Paper award. 
  • 4/30/17: We had a nice gathering at CRAVE Galleria to celebrate my tenure and promotion. Thank all of my dear colleagues - faculty, staff, and PhD students - who attended and helped make this a very memorable day for me. Here is our group picture. 
  • 4/24/17: Our paper titled "Mind the Gap: Accounting for Measurement Error and Misclassification in Variables Generated via Data Mining" and co-authored with Mochen Yang, Gedas Adomavicius, and Gordon Burtch has been accepted by Information Systems Research. 
  • 4/21/17: I visited the Sam M. Walton College of Business at University of Arkansas and had a great time touring the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Highly recommend it!
  • 1/30/17: Honored and humbled to receive the Mary and Jim Lawrence Fellowship from my school.  
 
  • 11/18/16: I visited the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University. 
  • 11/03/16: I visited the Robert H. Smith School of Business at University of Maryland. 
  • 09/30/16: I am very honored to receive the Carlson School of Management Outstanding Teaching Award. 
  • 09/14/16: I am now a Senior Editor and Diffusion (Social Media) Editor at Organization Science. 
  • 09/01/16: Our National Science Foundation grant was funded.  We received $919,979 to develop and test a computational theory of online communities (with Robert Kraut at Carnegie Mellon University and Yan Chen and Qiaozhu Mei at University of Michigan). 
  • 06/10/2016: I ran the 200 mile Madison-Chicago Ragnar Relay with 11 Chinese friends. Here is our Prairie Wolves team picture.