SMU Assistant Professor of Information Systems Hady Lauw was featured in a Straits Times article where he shared his research interest and discussed the challenges in data research. Assistant Prof Lauw specialises in data management and analytics, studying data generated by individuals to learn their preferences. Noting that a person leaves traces of his likes and dislikes as he makes an online purchase, reviews a hotel or searches for a movie, he said a pattern can be derived by tracking his behaviour over time and mining the data. In his four years at SMU, Assistant Prof Lauw has been developing ways to go beyond analysing things like clicks and ratings to looking at texts and images. He added that one of the biggest problems in data research is segmentation in information, where “different businesses have different data and they don’t share”, resulting in a limited understanding of a user. Assistant Prof Lauw is trying to address this by creating a data model from publicly available information, on places like social media sites, which can be integrated with the data businesses have to help them better understand their customers.
[Featured Photo: Assistant Professor Hady Lauw]