Yan Leng
Yan Leng

Yan Leng

Assistant Professor at UT Austin

About

I am an Assistant Professor in the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. Additionally, I hold courtesy appointments with the Department of Computer Science and the School of Information. I am also an affiliated faculty member of the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, a core member of the UT Machine Learning Lab, and affiliated with MIT.

I received my Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab in 2020. Prior to this, I earned dual Master's degrees in Computer Science and Transportation Engineering from MIT. My research is supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Marketing Science Institute, and UT Austin.

My research focuses on AI measurement and decision-making in networks.

  • AI measurement. I study the economic behavior of AI systems, such as their preferences and biases, and when measurements produced by AI systems are valid. My work develops methods to correct measurement error and its consequences for inference and decision-making, and to identify where additional human data would be most useful.
  • Networks and decision-making. I study how social relationships shape behavior and how network information can inform decisions. My work examines social influence and adoption, learns network structure from observed behavior, and develops personalized decision support through interpretable recommendations. Read more about this research.

My research has received the INFORMS ISS Cluster Best Paper Award, the INFORMS Data Science Workshop Best Student Paper Award and Best Paper Runner-up recognition, second prize in the INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Data-Driven Challenge, and the CBA Foundation Research Excellence Award for Assistant Professors.

I have received the Trammell/CBA Foundation Teaching Award for Assistant Professors and have been named to the McCombs BBA Faculty Honor Roll five times. I designed and teach the first foundational generative AI course for business students at McCombs.

Feel free to reach out if you have a research question, dataset, or application where our interests overlap.