McGill University hosted its annual Bravo Gala on Thursday, March 21, which honours its faculty members and researchers who have won special awards, memberships and prizes over the past year. McGill Desautels is proud to announce 14 of its faculty amongst the distinguished honourees this year. Congratulations to our deserving laureates! Full list below.
#Bravo2024

· Geneviève Bassellier, Best AMCIS Emergent Research Forum Paper, Americas Conference on Information Systems

Authors: Yinan Yu, Warut Khern-am-nuai, Alain Pinsonneault and Zaiyan Wei

Publication: Journal of Management Information Systems
Volume 40, Issue 4, December 2023, Pages 1271-1300

Authors: Warut Khern-am-nuai, Hyunji So, Maxime C. Cohen and Yossiri Adulyasak

Publication: Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Forthcoming

Abstract:

Restaurant review platforms, such as Yelp and Tripadvisor, routinely receive large numbers of photos in their review submissions. These photos provide significant value for users who seek to compare restaurants. In this context, the choice of cover images (i.e., representative photos of the restaurants) can greatly influence the level of user engagement on the platform. Unfortunately, selecting these images can be time consuming and often requires human intervention. At the same time, it is challenging to develop a systematic approach to assess the effectiveness of the selected images. In this paper, we collaborate with a large review platform in Asia to investigate this problem. We discuss two image selection approaches, namely crowd-based and AI-based systems. The AI-based system we use learn complex latent image features, which is further enhanced by transfer learning to overcome the scarcity of labeled data. We collaborate with the platform to deploy our AI-based system through a randomized field experiment to carefully compare both systems. We find that the AI-based system outperforms the crowd-based counterpart and boosts user engagement by 12.43%-16.05% on average. We then conduct empirical analyses on observational data to identify the underlying mechanisms that drive the superior performance of the AI-based system. Finally, we infer from our findings that the AI-based system outperforms the crowd-based system for restaurants with a (i) longer tenure on the platform, (ii) limited number of user-generated photos, (iii) lower star rating, and (iv) lower user engagement during the crowd-based system.

Across programs and subject areas, the Desautels Faculty of Management recognizes the vital role that teaching plays in enriching the student experience and in inspiring the next generation of leaders.

The Distinguished Teaching Award recipients Anna Kim and Warut Khern-am-nuai were honoured at McGill’s 2023 Management Convocation ceremony on May 31, for their excellence in teaching.

Authors: Warut Khern-am-nuai, H. Ghasemkhani, D. Qiao and K.N. Kannan

Publication: Information Systems Research, Forthcoming

We are proud to share that Warut Khern-am-nuai, Associate Professor in Information Systems, has been named to the Poets&Quants 50 Best Undergraduate Professors of 2022 list. This fifth edition of the award received more than 500 nominations from more than 50 of the best undergraduate business programs, including a dozen international schools.

How can Artificial Intelligence augment and even improve management of and within organizations? In the interdisciplinary arena of management, AI is being applied to big-picture issues of organizational strategy and supply chain operations, as well as the ethical details of human resources and the many moving parts of the retail industry.