HKUST Business School Magazine

Feature Biz@HKUST 58 Social Life The Center for Business and Social Analytics leverages business and social big data to help us understand human behavior. In today’s digital era, the abundance of data generated through social media platforms, peer- to-peer applications, and emerging technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G networks, has created opportunities for uncovering valuable insights through data analytics. To meet these demands, HKUST’s Center for Business and Social Analytics (CBSA) is on a mission to study timely business and social problems by harnessing the power of big data. Drawing on the expertise of faculty and researchers from a range of disciplines, CBSA engages in a variety of projects. These include constructing Hong Kong’s first forward-looking tourism index using forecasts powered by artificial intelligence, developing sentiment indices based on sentiment expressed in financial reports and earnings calls of listed companies, exploring the impact of how sentiments are shaped on the Internet and assessing how law and policy influence sentiment. Unlike traditional methods such as opinion polls and surveys, CBSA leverages business and social big data to generate insights and analysis. Researchers can tackle complex issues by extracting useful information from sources such as social media posts and interpersonal exchanges to assess a crowd’s sentiment and behavior at a given time. Data analytics has become a key field in the understanding of human behavior, and it can also address societal challenges. Such advances allow the university to drive meaningful change. Project Showcase: Hong Kong’s First Forward-looking Tourism Index Supporting Tourism with AI-Powered Forecasts CBSA has launched the Wisers-HKUST Tourism Index in collaboration with Wisers Information Limited (Wisers) in support of Hong Kong’s tourism growth. As Hong Kong’s first forward-looking tourism index leveraging artificial intelligence (AI)-powered forecasts, the project enables industry stakeholders to better gauge near-term tourism outlook for pre-emptive policy and business planning, thereby contributing to the tourism industry’s long-term development. The Index offers forecasts of key tourism metrics, such as overall tourism sector outlook, mainland visitors’ arrivals, hotel occupancy, and hotel average daily rate, based on a predictive model of mainlanders’ intentions in traveling to Hong Kong. The model was constructed using leading-edge AI technologies, such as natural language processing and machine learning, to analyze over 10 million data points from social media platforms, online travel agencies, and travel forums in Mainland China. This forward-looking indicator offers a glimpse of the near-term sector outlook, and its forecast values for the current month and the next two months are publicly accessible. Senior Associate Dean of HKUST Business School and Director of CBSA Professor HUI Kai-Lung (second from right) and Adjunct Associate Professor of HKUST Business School and Advisor of CBSA Professor HE Chao (first from right) spearhead the development of the Wisers-HKUST Tourism Index at HKUST.