This is really my pleasure, participating in this interview and I come from kind of middle sized city in China, and then I went to Beijing for my college and graduation. So at that time I was in the engineering department as many IS faculty's background and that time my dream was trying to do a kind of consulting particularly IT consulting so I got a chance to visit MIT Sloan School of Management in my actually Ph.D. program in China. At that time, I was in engineering, a PhD student in engineering. So in my fifth year, I went to MIT Sloan as an exchange student and I got a chance to work with Professor Stuart Madnick at MIT Sloan school. So it was all ready and that I tried to get some experience about business, particularly about consulting so that while I graduate from my PhD program in China I can be good IT consultant, but since I did research with Professor Madnick, I realized the business research is really interesting to me, particularly IT related business research and also professor Madnick demonstrates high passion and the motivation into himself doing research in IT related business issues, so that kind of gave me high motivation and dream. So during the one year with it, I decided okay, maybe I should change my career path so I decided to apply and go to the PhD program with the MIT Sloan school. So during that year, I applied and luckily at last, I got admission from Sloan school so after the one year with it, I was officially admitted and entered the PhD program at MIT. So that's kind of the how I get into the PhD program in IT, IS in particular.

My major, my earlier research interest was focus on software engineering that's came from my earlier background. Then when I took courses at Sloan and gradually over the time, I became more interested in economic information system, particularly I'm trying to look at the social and economic impact of IT related innovations, I can say. So my research projects, for example, you know during, in the later stage of my PhD program and in the early stage of my faculty career, I've worked on quite a few projects related to online promotion, in the context of the Groupon promotions. I got interested because when I was thinking about my research project in 2010, Groupon was a very popular phenomenon. Daily deals for public, It was a very successful company at that time, so I was very keen to look for some research questions in this context and I found, for example, I found that there is, my key insight is Groupon as a promotion has very strong interaction with social media phenomenon. By social media, I mean online review or Facebook interaction, particularly I've found, for example, restaurants when they do Groupon promotion, by doing Groupon promotions, restaurants can somehow change their online reputation in terms of, for example, Yelp review and I tried to establish the causal impact between Groupon promotion and the restaurant's online review. This is one piece, second, I found the opposite causal direction, which I found the restaurants' Groupon review can actually cause restaurant's Groupon voucher, I mean not only for sales, but also for popularity on Facebook, for example, particularly I found that when the restaurant has a higher online review on Yelp website, actually Groupon users are more likely to endorse the restaurant's coupon voucher through Facebook. So I found this is very, so basically online reputation and the social media are the buzzwords by which I mean bi directional causal relations as I've found. So that's my I would say, research project I have finished two years ago and well recently, i'm looking at that, let's say medical crowdfunding. It is the newest context to say, for example, how to frame a medical crowdfunding project can motivate people to donate more money to the patients, and this is one of the projects and also another project, I look at the sharing economy, particularly, for example, peer to peer lending platform, or let's see, back sharing platform are the phenomena which are related to my research interests.

Yes, I think roughly just mentioned that a bit so because my subject is of IS, I found that people tend to look at, look for interesting questions related to a new phenomena. So as I mentioned for the Groupon study around 2010, the daily deal or Groupon promotion and was very interested in the emerging phenomenon. So at that time, I tried to look at the new phenomena. Nowadays sharing economy, let's say peer to peer lending, crowdfunding or let's say AirBnB, the home sharing platform are all interesting and emerging phenomenon. So, one of the experiences I found would be probably very helpful, is it we tried to look for recent question in a new phenomena. That's one of the experience effort and in terms of how to assess the potential of the project. And one of the key criteria or hurdle that we have to conquer in terms of the application is to identify the causal impact. So for me, while I try to think about a project nowadays, the first question I have to ask me is, can I clearly identify and establish the causal impact. So what I think come back across the solution in terms of the identification strategy out there, I can say ok, this product probably is worth well to pursue. If I have no idea or I feel that the identification is not that clear, then I would be headed to initiate the project by identification strategy and either we can use quasi-experimental methods that say we use the difference, the potential for matching or regressions design. Or nowadays, we can conduct a field experiment. So those criteria, I think, are used to assess the potential of the project.