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Zhepeng (Lionel) Li

Associate Professor in IIM, Faculty of Business and Economics, The University of Hong Kong

Greetings, my name is pronounced ‘Dzerpon Lee.’ I specialize in the intersection of applied machine learning and business artificial intelligence/analytics. My primary focus is on Geometric Machine Learning, encompassing areas such as personalized recommendations, social network analytics, target marketing, PropTech, HR analytics, financial analytics, and privacy-preserving distributed data mining.

My research aims to address significant business, managerial, and societal challenges through machine/deep learning, predictive modeling, and computational design science. I formulate business questions as learning problems, analyze theoretical efficacy of the proposed methods, develop machine learning algorithms, and benchmark these methods using realistic data through performance evaluations, business cases, ablation tests, experiments, and other empirical analyses.

Research Interests

  • Artificial Intelligence in Business
  • Business/Data Analytics
  • Information Retrieval
  • Data Privacy and Information Security

Education Background

  • PhD in Information Systems (Minor in CS), University of Utah, Salt Lake City, USA, 2013
  • Master in Management Science & Engineering, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China, 2007

Teaching Recognition

  • Faculty Outstanding Teacher Award (Postgraduate), 2025
  • Top 10%, Faculty Teaching Reward Scheme (Undergraduate), 2025

Student Expectations

  • Self-motivation: doctoral students are expected to show passion and take the initiative in your own project(s).
  • Rigorous Creativity: doctoral students need to show novelty that survives technical, quantitative, or analytical examinations in a long run.
  • Maturity: graduate students need to show professionalism in communications and works.
  • Integrity: all students should assume the highest standard of integrity and ethics in all aspects of coursework and research. Absolute zero tolerance shall be committed at multiple levels.

Working Projects

  • Use-inspired GenAI in Business and Society
  • LLM-based Recommender Systems in Personalizations
  • Graphical Neural Network in PropTech
  • Credit Risk Analytics in FinTech
  • Collective Performance in HR Analytics
  • People Analytics in Disaster Management
  • Text/Network Analytics in Social Computing