Weiguo (Patrick) Fan
Associate Professor of Information Systems and Computer Science
Email: wfan@vt.edu
Phone: 540-231-6588
Fax: 540-231-2511
Office: Pamplin 3104
Education:
Ph.D. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Specialization:
data/text mining, business intelligence, information management
Biography
Dr. Weiguo (Patrick) Fan is an associate professor of information systems and computer science at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech). He received his Ph.D. in Information Systems from the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in July 2002, a M. Sce in Computer Science from the National University of Singapore in 1997, and a B. E. in Information and Control Engineering from the Xi'an Jiaotong University, P.R. China, in 1995.
Patrick currently teaches three core undergraduate courses: ACIS 1504 (Introduction to Business Information Systems), ACIS 4554 (Networks and Telecommunications in Business) and ACIS4564 (Object-Oriented System Development in Java) at Virginia Tech. Prior to that, he has taught undergraduate courses related to information systems, decision support systems, e-commerce and e-business at the University of Michigan and National University of Singapore.
His research interests focus on the design and development of novel information technologies --- information retrieval, data mining, text/web mining, personalization and knowledge management techniques --- to support better business information management and decision making. He has worked on the development of adaptive and intelligent text mining and web mining techniques for more advanced business intelligence applications, such as personalized web search result ranking and summarization, Web-based information extraction and question answering. Recently, he has started several research directions combining his technical and behavioral research strengths. Some sample recent projects include assessing the success, value, quality, and innovation in knowledge communities, financial fraud detection using text mining techniques, automatic genre detection and classification, and E-Business success and quality metrics. He has published more than 80 refereed journal and conference papers. His research has appeared in many prestigious information technology journals such as Journal of Management Information Systems, Communications of the ACM, Journal of the American Society on Information Science and Technology (JASIST), Information Processing and Management (IP&M), IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), IEEE Intelligent Systems, Information Systems (IS), Decision Support Systems (DSS), ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT), International Journal of Electronic Business, and in leading information technology conferences such as SIGIR, WWW, CIKM, HLT, ICIS, HICSS, AMCIS,DS, ICOTA, etc. His text mining research on ranking function discovery for search engine optimization, question answering on the Web, and text summarization has been cited more than 400 times according to Google Scholar. His research is currently funded by four NSF grants and one PWC grant.
Patrick is married to Jing Xu, with three sons -- Brandon, Jonathan and Winston.