Dr. Hao (Howard) ZHONG is an associate professor in the Information and Operations Management (IOM) department and the scientific co-director of MSc in Business Analytics & AI at ESCP Business School (Paris).

His research interests include data mining, business analytics, computational design science, entrepreneurial finance, and venture analytics. His work has appeared in multiple top venues in data mining and information systems, including Decision Support Systems (DSS), Information & Management (I&M), Annals of Operations Research (AOR), IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), and IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC). He has also presented his research at leading academic conferences, such as ICIS, CIST, HICSS, WITS, KDD, ICDM, and SDM. He has served as a Senior Program Committee member at AAAI and as a Program Committee member at IJCAI, WWW, CIKM, KSEM, etc.

He is a fellow of Artificial Intelligence and Decision Making (AI&DM) research center and Center for Design Science in Entrepreneurship (DS:E). He also served as co-chair of AI cluster at INFORMS Annual Meeting in 2021-2026. He has received the Best Paper Runner-up award at WITS 2022. He was awarded the ESCP Young Teaching Excellence Prize in 2024.

Before joining ESCP, he enjoyed a three-year entrepreneurial experience as a co-founder and Chief Data Scientist of a FinTech startup in China, which leverages the power of Big Data and AI to provide risk management products and services for top financial clients. The startup has been acquired by Duxiaoman Financial, Baidu.

He received his Ph.D. in Management (Information Technology) from the Business School of Rutgers University. He was a visiting professor at the AI Thrust of HKUST (Guangzhou) in 2023 and 2026.

For more information, please visit my personal website.