Online Communities and Platforms
Group dynamics, content moderation, and platform governance.
PhD Candidate in Information Systems and Analytics
Xiaoxuan (Cleo) Xu
I am a PhD candidate in Business Administration with a concentration in Information Systems and Analytics at Stevens Institute of Technology. My research uses computational social science, natural language processing, and large language models, paired with human-centered analysis, to study how digital communities communicate, organize, and make meaning.
Before my PhD, I trained in media, culture, and communication at New York University and advertising at Minzu University of China, with prior industry experience in publishing, marketing, and financial news. Outside academia, cats, sports, and movies keep me grounded.
Research
My work studies how people, organizations, and communities create cultural meaning, coordinate action, and communicate in platform-mediated social and economic life. I use state-of-the-art computational methods to examine how discourse, narratives, and collective signals emerge from large-scale digital traces and inform organizational decisions, market dynamics, and societal understanding.
Multimodal Digital Discourse
Podcasts, audio narratives, text, and computational approaches to culture and storytelling.
Computational Social Science
NLP, LLMs, embeddings, causal inference, econometrics, and network analysis.
Papers
The Deplatforming Paradox
Major revision at MIS Quarterly. Presented at INFORMS 2023.
Examines hidden bias spillovers from deplatformed communities using word embedding association methods.
A Multimodal Discourse Framework for Decoding Podcasts:
Presented at WITS 2025 and Computational Methods in Management Research Workshop 2026.
Develops an LLM-based rhetorical structure parsing pipeline to quantify narrative structures from podcast audio.
When Communities Watch: Locational Public Discourse and Municipal Bond Markets
Work in progress.
Links geo-locational community discourse to municipal fiscal health through NLP-extracted soft information.
Consumer Complaint, Company Resolution, and Consumer Dispute of the Resolution
Under review at Journal of Business Research.
Uses machine learning and consumer complaint narratives to predict dispute escalation after company responses.
Teaching
My teaching interests include business analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence and its business applications. In the classroom, I aim to help students reason critically about technology while building practical analytical skills they can use with confidence.
BIA 568: Management of A.I. Technologies
Instructor, scheduled Fall 2026. A graduate course on strategic deployment, algorithmic governance, and ethical evaluation of enterprise AI.
BIA 660: Web Mining
Teaching assistant, three terms. Led Python labs on NLP and LLM methods.
Interactive LLM labAnalytics Courses
TA for social network analytics, optimization, and multivariate data analysis.
Presentations
2026
People + Machine Workshop
PhD Student Lightning Talks, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ
2026
PDW @ Computational Methods in Management Research Workshop
University of Notre Dame, South Bend, IN
2026
PhD Research Showcase Day
Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ
2025
The 35th Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems (WITS 2025)
Nashville, TN
2025
School of Business IS&A Research Seminar
Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ
2024
MIS Quarterly Author Development Workshop
Virtual
2023
INFORMS Annual Meeting
Phoenix, AZ
Personal
Besides research, I'm usually wrangling my infant son, keeping my cat full & entertained, working out on a court or in the gym.
Furry Friend
At home, I share life with an orange tabby (American shorthair), who brings a lot of calm and joy to my everyday routine.
A New Role
I recently became a mom. I am learning, day by day, how to care, adapt, work more efficiently, and grow with my baby boy.
Stay Active
Exercise and challenging myself make me feel present. I enjoy running, court games, and going to the gym. I completed a half marathon within six months postpartum.