• Associate Professor of Information Systems and Business Analytics

  • Purity College of Business Administration, University of Illinois at Chicago
  • Purity Google Scholar
  • Purity [email protected]

About Me

I am an Associate Professor (with tenure) of Information Systems and Business Analytics in the Department of Information and Decision Sciences at the College of Business Administration, University of Illinois at Chicago. Given the diversity of my intellectual interests, I am also affiliated with the Department of Marketing and the Department of Computer Science. Previously, I was a Research Scientist at IBM Research AI. I currently serve as an Associate Editor at Electronic Commerce Research and Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and on the Editorial Boards of Journal of Business Analytics and Journal of Database Management .

Trained as a computer scientist, I am passionate about problems at the intersection of computer science, social science, and business. My research is motivated by and contributes to applications in Social Informatics, Civic Informatics, Digital Platforms, and Human-AI interactions. My research employs empirical analyses rooted in machine learning, natural language processing, econometrics, and lab & field experimentation to better discover and make sense of human behavior from large-scale, networked, dynamic, and sparse data. My research has been published in various leading journals, including Information Systems Research (ISR), MIS Quarterly (MISQ), INFORMS Journal on Computing (JOC), Journal of Management Information Systems (JMIS), Journal of the Association for Information Systems (JAIS), IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), ACM Journal of Data and Information Quality (JDIQ), as well as premier computer science venues, including ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing (CHI), AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), and AAAI Conference on Artificial Intengenllence (AAAI). My work has been generously supported by multiple grants from the Marketing Science Institute, Nvidia, and Amazon.

My research has won a number of best paper awards and nominations at major conferences, including International Conference on Information Systems (2021), Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (2021), ​the Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems (2018, 2020), the Conference on information systems and technology (2017), INFORMS Annual Conference eBusiness Cluster (2017), the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing (2013). My dissertation research on machine learning and social event analytics received a Letter of Commendation from the University President of Arizona State University. My work and opinions have been cited by numerous national and international outlets in the popular press, including LSE Business Review, The Verge, ABC News, WIRED magazine, the Huffington Post, PBS, Seattle Times, and Sydney Morning Herald. My research also generated two patents granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

I have been fortunate to have spent time at various inspirational institutions at different points in my career. I received my Ph.D in 2014 from the Department of Computer Science at Arizona State University, Tempe. I also did a few fun and fruitful internships in the FUSE group at Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA and Avaya Labs Research, Basking Ridge, NJ.