Faculty Profile
Xiaolu Wang
Assistant Professor of International Business & Management (2016)
Contact Information
Althouse Hall Room 210
717-254-8725
Bio
Prof. Xiaolu Wang received his Bachelor’s degree in engineering from Tsinghua University (Beijing, China) and Ph.D. in economic sociology from Columbia University. His research interests include pricing theories and practices in marketing, causal inference in statistics, mathematical modeling of social systems, and big data in business. He has published in the journals of Mathematical Sociology, Sociological Studies, Chinese Economic Sociology Research, and other anthologies. His current research project uses techniques of big data, natural language processing, and large language models to study the economy of emotions in the pop music industry.
Education
- B.S., Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, 2004
- M.A., Columbia University, 2009
- M. Phil., 2010, Ph.D., 2015
2024-2025 Academic Year
Fall 2024
INBM 300 Big Data in Business
The rise of Big Data has revolutionized our ways of perceiving and understanding the world across micro and macro levels (from decoding the human genome to predicting the result of the U.S. presidential election based on Facebook data). This is an introductory course designed to familiarize students with both the major quantitative and qualitative aspects of big data, with a particular focus on applications in the real business world-for example, tracing the formation of trust among strangers in the "sharing economies." Quantitatively, the course introduces the essential skills of managing, analyzing, and presenting data, using mainstream software packages and programming languages such as R and Python. Qualitatively, it covers the basic ideas of building the software and hardware infrastructure for a big data business system, explores various questions and problems (in business and other areas) that can be creatively addressed utilizing big data, and scrutinizes the corresponding cognitive, sociological, and ethical implications.