Dr. Hao (Howard) ZHONG is an associate professor with tenure in the Information and Operations Management (IOM) department and the scientific co-director of Master's programme in Big Data and Business Analytics 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 Center for Design Science in Entrepreneurship (DS:E). He also served as co-chair of AI cluster at INFORMS Annual Meeting since 2021. He has received the Best Paper Runner-up award at WITS 2022. He was awarded the ESCP Young Teaching Excellence Award 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.

For more information, please visit my personal website.

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26 publications

Academic Articles

2025

ZHONG, H., C. LIU, C. WU

Uncovering IT Career Path Patterns with Job Embedding-based Sequence Clustering

ACM TRANSACTIONS ON MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Academic Articles

2024

ZHONG, H., C. LIU

Firm profiling and competition assessment: A design science approach

INFORMATION AND MANAGEMENT

Academic Articles

2024

ZHONG, H., Y. CHEN, C. LIU, H. BENSON

Decision aggregation with reliability propagation

DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS, 178, 114130

Conference Proceedings

2024

ZHONG, H., Z. YUAN, D. ZHANG, Y. DRAGON JIANG, S. ZHANG, H. XIONG

AlphaVC: A Reinforcement Learning-based Venture Capital Investment Strategy

Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS)

Conference Proceedings

2024

ZHANG, S., H. ZHONG, Y. GE, H. XIONG

Bring Me a Good One: Seeking High-potential Startups using Heterogeneous Venture Information Networks

Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS)

ESCP Impact Papers

2024

BENYAYER, L. -D., H. ZHONG

Beyond automation: Crafting a future where AI augments, not replaces

ESCP Impact Papers, 2024-45-EN

Other Intellectual Contributions

2024

BENYAYER, L. -D., H. ZHONG

Pour une intelligence artificielle générative qui augmente plus qu'elle ne remplace

ECHOS (LES)

Conference Proceedings

2023

ZHONG, H., C. LIU

Firm Profiling and Competition Assessment: A Heterogeneous Occupation Network–based Approach

Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS)

Conference Proceedings

2023

ZHONG, H., Y. CHEN, C. LIU, H. BENSON

Decision Aggregation with Reliability Propagation

Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems (PACIS)

Conference Proceedings

2023

ZHONG, H., C. LIU

Career Path Clustering via Sequential Job Embedding and Mixture Markov Models

Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems (PACIS)