On April 13, at the invitation of the School of Management, Professor Ma Baojun from Shanghai International Studies University delivered an academic report entitled "Exploration of Cutting-edge Interdisciplinary Business Research Empowered by Artificial Intelligence: Evidence from Series Research on Intelligent Finance and FinTech" in Lecture Hall 214 of the School of Management. The report was hosted by Professor Wang Yang from the School of Management, and some faculty members and students attended the event.

At the beginning of the session, Professor Wang Yang briefly introduced Professor Ma Baojun’s academic background and research achievements. Faculty and students of the School of Management extended a warm welcome to Professor Ma. In this report, Professor Ma presented cutting-edge interdisciplinary research at the intersection of artificial intelligence and finance conducted in recent years, focusing on a series of intelligent finance and FinTech research empowered by artificial intelligence technologies such as sentiment analysis and deep learning for text, image, audio and video analysis. Firstly, he introduced research on influencing factors of corporate trade credit from the perspective of textual features in corporate social responsibility reports, and explained the research on the impact of the aesthetics of corporate social responsibility reports on corporate debt financing costs. Secondly, he shared research on how facial, voice and video features of corporate executives affect firm performance, and illustrated feature extraction and relevant model construction for multimodal information from earnings conference calls. Finally, he further prospected the future of interdisciplinary business research empowered by artificial intelligence.

After the presentation, Professor Ma Baojun exchanged views with faculty and students on the integration of intelligent technologies and management practices. The event witnessed a strong academic atmosphere.

(Written by:Lin Yunpei Reviewed by:Jia Ming)

About the speaker:Ma Baojun holds a Bachelor’s degree and Doctoral degree in Management from Tsinghua University. He is a Grade 3 Professor and Doctoral Supervisor at Shanghai International Studies University. He once served as Executive Vice Dean of the School of Business and Management and a member of the University Academic Committee. He is a Young Scholar of the Major Talent Program of the Ministry of Education and Shanghai Top Young Talent. He serves as Deputy Director of the Key Laboratory of Brain-Computer Collaborative Information Behavior (supported by the Ministry of Education and Shanghai Municipality), leader of the first batch of virtual teaching and research offices for Information Management major approved by the Ministry of Education, person in charge of key undergraduate teaching reform projects and municipal key courses of Shanghai universities. He has long been committed to promoting the interdisciplinary integration of management research driven by artificial intelligence and data science, with a focus on improving the "intelligent discovery capability", "intelligent utilization capability" and "intelligent empowerment capability" of big data resources. He has presided over the Excellent Youth Team Project for Central Universities sponsored by the Ministry of Education, two NSFC General Projects and one NSFC Young Scientists Fund Project. In recent years, he has published more than 40 papers in authoritative domestic and international journals including POMS, INFORMS JoC and Journal of Management Science in China. He compiled a national planned textbook for undergraduate education in the 12th Five-Year Plan period. Several of his policy advisory reports have been adopted by the Cyberspace Administration of China. He has won many teaching and research honors and awards including two Second-Class National Teaching Achievement Awards, Second-Class National Textbook Construction Award, Second-Class Provincial and Ministerial Excellent Achievement Award in Philosophy and Social Sciences, and the Theoretical Contribution Award of China Information Economics.