Speaker: Shunyuan Zhang, Harvard Business School
Title: Visual Analytics in Marketing Research
Date/Time: April 12, 2023 @15:30 CET/09:30 ET. Register ►here

Abstract
The growth of social media and the sharing economy is generating abundant unstructured image and video data. Computer vision techniques can derive rich insights from unstructured data and can inform recommendations for increasing profits and consumer utility. An emerging stream of research has focused on understanding how machine learning models explore complex, non-linear underlying structures and transform what they “see” into high-dimensional vectors, which may provide useful insights that cannot be detected by the human eye. We use a few recent papers as an example to discuss the opportunities and challenges in using visual analytics for marketing research and how one might approach it differently.

About the speaker
Shunyuan Zhang is an Assistant Professor in the Marketing unit at Harvard Business School. She teaches the first-year Marketing course in the MBA required curriculum. Shunyuan studies the sharing economy and the marketing problems that the dynamics of this new economy present. She deploys machine learning methods including deep learning to extract useful information from unstructured data. Combining this information with structured data, Shunyuan conducts thorough analysis and policy simulations to examine important issues emerging in the sharing economy arena. Shunyuan earned a Ph.D. in Marketing/Business Technology from Carnegie Mellon University, Tepper School of Business. She has a B.S. in Physics from the University of Science and Technology of China