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Business Research and Innovation Program

2024 Research Grant Awardees

AI Mentors and Access to Capital for Disadvantaged Entrepreneurs

Their project aims to determine whether mentoring can help minority entrepreneurs overcome barriers to accessing funding compared to non-minority entrepreneurs. By testing both human and AI-based mentoring, they hope to understand which mentoring form is more effective. With the Truist funding, they will develop a chatbot using advanced AI technology and partner with an organization supporting entrepreneurs to pilot the tool with a small group. The results will be used to seek funding for a larger scaled-up study. They hope that this study will benefit minority entrepreneurs and foster equity in business funding.

  • Dr. Krista Saral, Associate Professor of Economics; Belk College of Business, University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
  • Dr. Paul Gaggl, Associate Professor of Economics; Belk College of Business, University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
  • Dr. Siddharth Krishnan, Assistant Professor of Computer Science; College of Computing and Informatics, University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
  • Dr. Arun Ravindran, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering; William States Lee College of Engineering, University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
  • Dr. David Cooper, Tippie-Rollins Chair and Professor of Economics; Tippie College of Business, University of Iowa.

Enhancing Social Media Content Moderation through User Engagement and Domain Knowledge

Their project focuses on online content moderation. Social media has become a major platform for sharing information and experiences, but it also harbors inappropriate content due to its anonymity and openness. Effective content moderation is crucial for enhancing user engagement and fostering positive interactions online. This funding will help them improve the well-being and trustworthiness of online communities and society as a whole by advancing AI models for content moderation and deepening our understanding of influential factors on content moderation decisions.

  • Lina Zhou, Professor, Department of Business Information Systems and Operations Management; Belk College of Business, University of North Carolina, Charlotte.
  • Dongsong Zhang, Belk Endowed Chair Professor, Department of Business Information Systems and Operations Management; Belk College of Business, University of North Carolina, Charlotte.

Leading and Following with Emotion: An Investigation of Emotional Expression in Virtual Meetings

  • Dr. George C. Banks, Chair and Professor, Department of Management; Belk College of Business, University of North Carolina, Charlotte.
  • Dr. Janaki Gooty, Professor, Department of Management; Belk College of Business, University of North Carolina, Charlotte.
  • Dr. Scott Tonidandel, Director and Professor, Department of Management; Belk College of Business, University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
  • Wenwen Dou, Associate Professor of Computer Science; College of Computing and Informatics, University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
2023 Research Grant Awardees

Online Misinformation Characterization and Detection from Social Media Based on Within-Post Multimodal Content Consistency

Health misinformation has infiltrated and proliferated on every social media platform, causing substantial harm to individuals, families, organizations, businesses, and the entire society. The Web 3.0 era further enables misinformation to grow in multimodal social media content, such as images and audio/videos. Within-post inconsistencies across multimodalities, known as content topic and sentiment shift, is an emerging characteristic of misinformation to deceive users and alter their perceptions towards reliable information. Nevertheless, how within-post inconsistencies result in misinformation remains understudied. To keep up with the new trend of multimodal misinformation, we propose a theoretical framework to quantify within-post content inconsistencies across text, image, and audio/video modalities, design a consistency scoring mechanism, and develop a multimodal misinformation detector. This study builds theoretical and technical foundations for future misinformation detection, advance our understanding of multimodal misinformation, and provide much needed preliminary work and empirical evidence.

  • Dongsong Zhang, Belk Endowed Chair Professor, BISOM Department, Belk College of Business
  • Lina Zhou, Professor, BISOM Department, Belk College of Business
  • Shi Chen, Associate Professor, Department of Public Health Sciences, CHHS1 Yaorong Ge, Professor, Department of Software and Information Systems, CCI
  • Daniel Janies, Carol Grotnes Belk Distinguished Professor of Bioinformatics and Genomics/Co-Director for Computational Intelligence to Predict Health and Environmental Risks (Cipher), Department of Bioinformatics, CCI

Information Frictions and the Efficacy of the PPP Loan in Mitigating the Economic Impact of COVID-19 for Small Businesses

  • Sungjune Park Professor of MIS, Department of Business Information Systems and Operations Management The Belk College of Business, UNC Charlotte
  • Chandrasekar Subramaniam Associate Professor of MIS, Department of Business Information Systems and Operations Management The Belk College of Business, UNC Charlotte

Gendered Interactions and Inclusive Leadership (GIIL)*

  • Dr. Janaki Gooty, Professor, Department of Management; Belk College of Business, University of North Carolina, Charlotte.
  • Dr. Jill Yavorsky, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology; College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of North Carolina, Charlotte.
  • Dr. Nicole Strah, Assistant Professor, Department of Management; Belk College of Business, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
  • Dr. Eric Heggestad, Professor, Department of Psychological Science; College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Enhancing Leader Effectiveness Using Artificial Intelligence

  • George Banks, Professor and Chair, Department of Management
  • Scott Tonidandel, Professor, Department of Management and School of Data Science

A Model For Effective Call Routing to Maximize Customer Satisfaction

  • Moutaz Khouja, Professor, Business Information Systems and Operations Management Department The Belk College of Business, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte