Weiguo (Patrick) Fan
L. Mahlon Harrell Research Fellow
Professor of Accounting and Information Systems
Professor of Computer Science (courtesy)
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 a Full Professor of Accounting and Information Systems and Full Professor of Computer Science (courtesy) at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech). He received his Ph.D. in Business Administration from the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 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 teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Accounting (Principles and Intermediate), Business Data Communications, Object-Oriented System Development in Java, Management of Information Systems, and Information Systems Auditing and Control 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, business intelligence techniques --- to support better business information management and decision making. He has published more than 120 refereed journal and conference papers. His research has appeared (or will appear) in journals such as Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Information Systems, Communications of the ACM, Journal of the American Society on Information Science and Technology, Information Processing and Management, Decision Support Systems, ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, Pattern Recognition, IEEE Intelligent Systems, Pattern Recognition Letters, International Journal of e-Collaboration, and International Journal of Electronic Business.
His text mining research (ranking function discovery for search engine optimization, question answering on the Web, text summarization, etc.) has been cited more than 2500 times according to Google Scholar. His research on financial fraud auditing using automatic textual analysis has been mentioned numerous times in different online and news media (including Richmond Times, CFO magazine). His research has been funded by five NSF grants, one PWC grant, and one KPMG grant. Recently, he has started several new research projects, such as assessing the success, value, quality, and innovation in knowledge communities, strategic actions and firm performance in digital industries, financial fraud detection using text mining techniques, capital market research using automatic textual analysis, and E-Business success and quality metrics.
Patrick is the co-founder of Facet Analytics LLC, a new startup company that delivers the next generation Web services for financial statement fraud risk assessment.