At 10:00 a.m., November 23, 2022, the Business School of Central University of Finance and Economics (CUFE) held the 19th Session of the Excellent Academic Forum Lecture Series and the 1st Session of the Data Science Lecture Series online through Tencent Meeting. Associate professor Ma Liye from the Robert H.Smith School of Business, University of Maryland was invited as the keynote speaker of this lecture, and more than 30 people (including teachers, master and doctoral students, and undergraduate students) attended this lecture.

    Sun Luping, an associate professor of the Department of Marketing of the Business School, presided over this meeting and introduced associate professor Ma Liye’s resume. Ma Liye is a tenured associate professor at the Robert H.Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, who teaches such courses as big data & artificial intelligence and data science. His research focuses on using such methods as statistical measurement and machine learning to analyze consumer behaviors and consumers’ interaction with enterprises in the digital economy and to help enterprises formulate marketing strategies accordingly. Some of his research papers have been published in top marketing journals such as Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing and Management Science. He currently serves as the field editor-in-chief of the authoritative marketing journal “International Journal of Research in Marketing” and a member of the editorial boards of JMR and JM.

    The topic of associate professor Ma Liye’s lecture is “Image Network and Interest Group – A Heterogeneous Network Embedding Approach for Analyzing Social Curation on Pinterest”. In this research, he introduces the idea of heterogeneous network embedding to study the curation activities of social image websites. By analyzing big data from the image curation website Pinterest.com, he finds that the heterogeneous network embedding method can predict consumers' social curation activities in a manner more accurate than that of the traditional model, and can discover user interest groups and image communities, depict the user-image matching degree and provide deep insights into brand perception.

    After the sharing, the attending teachers and students actively participated in the discussion about the topic of the lecture delivered by associate professor Ma Liye, and the associate professor answered their questions in an enthusiastic manner, further deepening their academic exchanges.

    The “Excellent Academic Forum” is an academic exchange platform established by the Business School to fulfill the mission of “contributing new management knowledge”, which focuses on cutting-edge theoretical issues and organizational development dilemmas in the discipline of business administration and the Chinese enterprise management practice, and brings together frontier ideas and innovative ideas in China and abroad, so as to explore Chinese solutions for China's social and economic development.