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Dr. Bo Yu, an assistant professor of information systems, conducts highly interdisciplinary research joining technology and other research fields, including decision-making, design science and data science.

One of Dr. Yu's research foci is e-negotiation. He is interested in understanding how people make interactive decisions. He uses negotiation to study 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 AI-empowered technologies are used to represent users. These technologies can not only facilitate decision-making, but also directly make decisions on behalf of us. This 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, Yu 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 in theorizing designers’ views about our 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 also conducts research related  to healthcare analytics. His goal is to improve the reliability of our community pharmacies through 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.