Welcome to the personal website for Weiguo “Patrick” Fan, a full professor and Henry B. Tippie Excellence Chair in Business Analytics at Tippie College of Business, the University of Iowa. Click here for my official University of Iowa homepage.
I was born and raised in a small town called Pingdu in Qingdao, China. I attended Xi’an Jiaotong University pilot class (50 gifted students admitted without college admission tests) between 1991 and 1995 as an undergraduate student. Then I went to get my master’s degree in Computer Science from National University of Singapore. I graduated from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2002 with a Ph.D. in Information Systems under the advising of Professor Michael D. Gordon.
I have taught for 16 years at Virginia Tech (VT), a great university known for engineering and technology innovation. I worked with some of the greatest minds at VT, like Ed Fox, Naren Ramakrishnan, CT Lu, Doug Bowman, Alan Wang, Wenqi Shen. I moved up in rankings from assistant professor to full in 2011 and then to an Endowed professor in 2016. I co-founded the Center for Business Intelligence and Analytics in 2015 at Virginia Tech and helped grow the analytics research since then.
I have advised and chaired more than 10 Ph.D. students at VT. Many of them are now working in large technology companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft. Several of them stay in academia.
I moved to University of Iowa in July of 2018 with an Endowed Chair (Thanks to Henry Tippie, our long-time donor, supporter and alumni) in Business Analytics. I continue working with students on healthcare analytics, online review mining, deep learning, social media analytics, quality analytics, digital innovation, and platform economy.
I have great passions for both research and teaching.
My research interests focus on the design and development of novel information technologies — information retrieval, data mining, text analytics, social media analytics, AI (including NLP and deep learning), machine learning, and business intelligence techniques — to support better business information management and decision making. I have published more than 290 refereed journal and conference papers. My research has appeared in many premier IT/IS/OM journals such as MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, Productions and Operations Management, INFORMS Journal on Computing, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, Communications of the ACM, Decision Support Systems, Information and Management, Journal of the American Society on Information Science and Technology, Pattern Recognition, Information Systems, Information Processing and Management, ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems, IEEE Intelligent Systems, Expert Systems and Applications, Journal of Informetrics, Information Systems Frontiers, Journal of Computer Information Systems, Pattern Recognition Letters, International Journal of Information Management, International Journal of Hospitality Management, Tourism Management, Information Technology & People, Electronic Markets, Knowledge-based Systems, International Journal of e-Collaboration, and International Journal of Electronic Business, etc.
My research has been cited more than 16600 times (h-index 62, i10-index 175), as of 10/06/2023, according to Google Scholar. 7 papers have received the ESI Highly Cited Paper recognition. My research on financial fraud auditing using automatic textual analysis has been mentioned numerous times in different online and news media (including New York Times, Richmond Times, CFO magazine). My research on product defect discovery from social media has been featured in New York Times. My research has been funded by five NSF grants, one PWC grant (200k), and one KPMG grant (100k), one MeritData large research grant (120k). Recently, I have started several new research projects, such as assessing the success, value, quality, and innovation in knowledge communities, online review mining, crowdfunding, open innovations, firm disclosures in social media, healthcare analytics, competitive intelligence analytics, financial fraud detection using text mining techniques, capital market research using text analytics, product defect analytics, social media monitoring for crisis management, adverse event detection and mitigation, and E-Business success and quality metrics.
I teach Ph.D. seminar on Design Science Research Method, Data Management and Information Visualization, and Social Analytics at the University of Iowa.
In my spare time, I enjoy cooking, fishing, playing golf, pickleball, and tennis.