HKUST Business School Magazine

BUSINESS ANALYTICS Master of Science in We are now accepting applications for the 2022/23 Intake, so grasp the chance and be ready to keep leading in the future! Please feel free to contact us to learn more: Website ________ https://msba.hkust.edu.hk/ Email ________ msba@ust.hk Learn how to apply AI, machine learning, and statistics to core business functions ranging from finance to human resources. Business analytics is among the hottest fields for the following reasons: Progressive industry growth rate Opportunity to progress quickly and make an impact HKUST’s Master of Science in Business Analytics prepares you for a career in the fields of Consulting, Data Analytics, Finance, Information Technology, Product Management, etc. MSBA Program Features: • One-year full time / two-year part time master’s degree • Equip students with data analytic skills to optimize business performance and apply to real business problems • Cutting edge curriculum taught by world class faculty to meet industry needs • Supportive alumni and industry network • Career enhancement in the digital era C M Y CM MY CY CMY K Biz@HKUST 34 // Cover // Insight The National Security Law (NSL) and Social Media Sentiments One of the Center's research projects investigates how the actions initiated by the different authorities—such as the Chinese government, HKSAR, and international governments—and the implementation of the NSL on 1 July 2020 influenced the sentiments in various media channels in Hong Kong. We construct our sentiment model through manual labeling and then train it by a state-of-the-art machine learning model called MacBERT. Based on the fine-tuned model, we predict not only the sentiments of conventional media (e.g., newspapers and magazines), but also social media (e.g., Facebook, LIHKG) users’ sentiments towards the China-Hong Kong relationship. As a piece of model-free evidence, we depict the different trends of the daily proportion of sentiments (positive, neutral, and negative) across various media types. We observe that the total proportion of positive sentiment contents had increased during our empirical period (May 2020 to July 2020). This pattern is clearer for BBS sentiments. On the other hand, we see that the pattern is different for sentiments on newspapers. In sum, we find strong evidence of different impacts on the sentiments across various types of media and significant impacts of different authorities on the sentiments. Our sample comprises around 0.4 million posts and comments. About the Center for Business and Social Analytics The Center is committed to studying timely business and social problems by utilizing the big data available on the Internet. The data used in our research has a wide span, including social media posts, publicity, user-generated content, user likes and follows, and other social, business, and interpersonal exchanges. We draw on the strengths of faculty and researchers from diverse disciplines, such as business accounting and economics, information systems, decision analytics, finance, computer science, and humanities and social sciences, to produce evidence-based research with the aim of informing business practices and public policies. The Center actively collaborates with other academic, public, and private organizations who share the same vision of cultivating and analyzing social big data to uncover novel insights and knowledge. We welcome academic scholars and industry practitioners to work with us on addressing emerging business and social problems for the long-term betterment of Hong Kong and beyond.