Dr. Zhilei Qiao is an Assistant Professor of Information Systems in the Collat School of Business at UAB. He received his Ph.D. in Business Information Technology from Virginia Tech. Before beginning his academic career, he had more than seven years' IT industry experience. He worked as a software engineer or senior software engineer in two global IT companies: Infosys and DNV. His research interests include Social Media Analytics, Entrepreneurship, Mobile Analytics, Product Innovation and Text Mining. He has published and presented papers in refereed information systems conferences such as Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), Academy of Management (AOM) Annual Meeting, Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS), China Summer Workshop on Information Management (CSWIM), and the Business Analytics Congress (Pre-ICIS Workshop / SIGDSA). He was winners of the "Best Research Paper Runner-Up Award" in the 4th Business Analytics Congress in 2015 and the "Best Research Paper Award" in the Pre-ICIS Workshop SIGDSA 2020. His research has been published in the Journal of Management Information Systems and Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics. He is also a member of the Association for Information Systems (AIS), Decision Sciences Institute (DSI) and Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).