Research profile: Bo Yu

Dr. Bo Yu is an assistant professor of Management Information Systems. He conducts highly inter-disciplinary research joining technology and other research fields, including decision-making, design science and data science. One of his research foci is electronic negotiation. He is interested in understanding how people make interactive decisions. He is developing insights into technological agency, in which technologies are used to solve social issues on behalf of users. Technological agency illustrates the ways in which traditional social relationships and interaction can be modified when autonomous technologies are used to represent users. Technologies can not only facilitate decision-making, but also directly make decisions on behalf of us. His research has a potential to enrich our understanding about human-technology relationship and tackle challenging and controversial issues of technology and ethics.

As a practitioner, he designs systems and decision-support tools. As a researcher, he is interested in design as a research method. He believes that design can be not only systematic, but also instrumental to theorize designers’ views about our future world full of artifacts (i.e., things created by humans). The design of artifacts can be abstract, general, replicable and valuable for the future if conducted systematically, appropriately and rigorously.

He recently joined Safe Assured, a research group ensuring the reliability of our community pharmacies. He is interested in a data-driven approach using error-reporting data to enhance processes, improve service quality and reduce risk. He believes that the value of analytic technologies and methods comes from their contribution to decision-making.