Welcome to our Fall 2020 Newsletter

About the Leir Research Institute

The Henry J. and Erna D. Leir Research Institute for Business, Technology, and Society (LRI) creates value by integrating research and education to support economic and policy impacts that foster sustainable economic development, addressing critical global challenges to corporate and business continuity and growth.

The LRI operates in support of the NJIT 2025 four pillars: Diversity, Sustainability, Recognition, and Transformation. In coordination with the NJIT 2025 strategic plan, the LRI seeks to 1) promote collaborative research, 2) foster innovation and entrepreneurship, and 3) promote partnerships.

The vision of Henry J. and Erna D. Leir Research Institute for Business, Technology, and Society is to become recognized for business research that inclusively and collaboratively engages our academic, corporate, governmental, and non-profit partners. The Leir Research Institute will be a perpetual legacy honoring the memories of Henry J and Erna D. Leir and will also support the NJIT Martin Tuchman School of Management as it integrates academic research with important societal needs to solve critical societal problems.

The Henry J. and Erna D. Leir Research Institute for Business, Technology, and Society's research builds upon and leverages decades of NJIT experience and intellectual capital in the fields of sustainability and industrial ecology, environmental science, operations management and decision analytics, organizational behavior, and business data science.

More About Us

About our Business Data Science Ph.D. Program

Launched in Fall 2016, the Ph.D. program in Business Data Science at Martin Tuchman School of Management is a cutting-edge interdisciplinary program and a pioneer that integrates data science with business disciplines. In August 2020, the very first cohort in this program graduated with a Ph.D. degree: Weizhi Chen (advisor: Haisu Zhang; dissertation: “Peer-to-Peer Consumption in 3D Printing”) and Yasser Farha (advisor: Cesar Bandera; dissertation: “Mind Maps and Machine Learning: An Automation Framework for Qualitative Research in Entrepreneurship Education”).
 
Over 20 students are currently studying in this program. Our students’ research focuses on solving business problems by using data science techniques. Their research interests, which represent a wide range of business disciplines, include Fintech, machine learning in finance, computational advertising, customer modeling, innovation and entrepreneurship, data science in healthcare, social media analytics, and management information systems.
 
Collaborating with faculty in different disciplines, our doctoral students are active in scholarly activities, in addition to their dissertation research. Their work has been published in academic journals, such as Technovation, Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Emerging Markets Review, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, and International Journal of Organizational Analysis. Their research has also been presented in a number of academic conferences, such as the Web Conference, American Marketing Association Academic Conference, ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining, JPIM Research Forum, the United State Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship Conference, International Entrepreneurship Applied Research Symposium, and the Americas' Conference on Information Systems.

Meet our Students

About our Healthcare Research

Yi Chen, Henry J. Leir Chair in Healthcare and Professor in Business Data Science in Martin Tuchman School of Management, is conducting research to analyze the needs and to provide assistance to patients in Online Health Communities (OHC) using advanced machine learning technologies, funded by the Leir Foundation and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Her recent work that helps OHC users on the information overload problem by retrieving relevant information easily are published in the 29th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) in 2020, a premier conference in data management. One of her papers is nominated for a best poster paper award in the conference.

Seeking health information is the third most popular online activity (after using email and the search engine).  In particular, OHCs provide a popular channel for patients and caregivers to learn more about their current conditions, share concerns about health problems,  seek and offer various kinds of peer support, and connect with experts during their medical treatment and recovery processes. However, a big challenge that online users face when using the Web for health matters is information overload. Study shows that information overload makes it hard to keep users engaged in OHC. 

Dr. Chen’s team have developed an effective recommender system that suggests relevant discussion threads to users in order to address the information overload problem and to help users engaged in OHCs.  The proposed recommender system is called CLIR (Convolution and LDA Integrated Recommendation). CLIR models user interests and discussion content in two dimensions: topic and concept, and it takes into consideration the interaction between these dimensions using deep neural networks. The experimental evaluation on several OHCs datasets, including Cancer Survivor Network, MedHelp and HealthBoards, demonstrates that CLIR outperforms the state-of-the-art recommender systems on discussion thread recommendation. 

Two Ph.D. students, Mingda Li and Jinhe Shi, who conducted the research are hired by Pinterest and Amazon, respectively, for their outstanding research record, upon their graduation this summer.

2020 Research and Grant Update

In 2020, the MTSM faculty published 36 articles in academic journals, out of which 29 articles appeared (or to appear) in A* or A ranked journals, 7 articles appeared (or to appear) in B-ranked journals (Australian Business Deans Council Journal List).

In addition, Dr. Cesar Bandera received two grants of $200,000 (NIH) and $150,000 (CDC); Dr. Dantong Yu received a grant of $22.501 from NIH; Dr. Yi Chen and Dr. Reggie Caudill received two grants from NIH.

Spring 2021 Virtual Seminar Series

Check out our Seminar Series

Leir Research Institute Conference 2020

On Friday, August 14, 2020, the Leir Research Institute at the Martin Tuchman School of Management hosted its annual conference titled “Disruptive Technologies, Regulations, Business - Implications in the BioTech Industry,” where academics, students, and industry professionals gathered to explore disruptive technologies and business solutions to address the prevailing health and societal issues of the day.

Read Full Article

Meet the Director

Associate Professor Michael Ehrlich, PhD, the newly appointed Director of the Henry J and Erna D Leir Research Institute for Business, Technology, and Society (LRI), had an international Wall Street career before joining NJIT’s Martin Tuchman School of Management. Upon leaving Wall Street, Ehrlich started a small technology company that he sold in 2007. 

Ehrlich’s research focus is on financial markets and institutions, especially early stage companies, with an emphasis on 1) innovation, entrepreneurship, and the commercialization of technology; and 2) market failures.  As Senior Associate Editor of the Journal of Corporate Accounting & Finance, he promotes the cross pollination of scholarly research with practitioner cases to foster real world impact. Ehrlich founded and directs the New Jersey Innovation Acceleration Center and was awarded an NSF I-Corps Site grant to support the commercialization of technology. 

As LRI Director, Ehrlich plans to create value by integrating research and education to support economic and policy impacts that foster sustainable economic development. The LRI will support education through LRI fellowships for our Business Data Science PhD program and support research through grants to LRI academic scholars. The LRI will engage with societal partners through direct engagement, seminars, symposia, and outreach via our newsletter and social media outreach. LRI research will address critical global challenges to corporate and business continuity and growth. 

Ehrlich received his doctorate from Princeton University in economics. His bachelor’s degree is from Yale University.