Heng Xu Faculty Fellow-in-Residence Department of Information Technology and Analytics
- Bio
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Dr. Heng Xu is a Professor of Information Technology and Analytics in the Kogod School of Business at the American University. Before joining Kogod in 2018, she served as a faculty member at the Pennsylvania State University for 12 years, as well as a program director at the National Science Foundation for 3 years. She has also served on a broad spectrum of national leadership committees including co-chairing the Federal Privacy R&D Inter-agency Working Group in 2016, and serving on the National Academies Committee on Open Science in 2017-2018.
Dr. Xu's recent research focuses on responsible AI, fairness in machine learning, cybersecurity management, and privacy protection. She has published over 100 research papers and has been awarded multiple competitive research grants from multiple federal funding agencies including Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, National Institute of Health, and National Science Foundation. Her scholarly work has appeared in premier outlets across different fields such as Business, Computer Science, and Psychology, including Information Systems Research, Management Science, Management Information Systems Quarterly (MISQ), Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Personnel Psychology, Psychological Methods, and many others. Her interdisciplinary research has been featured in the popular media including the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, NPR, The Daily Mail, Science Daily, etc.
Dr. Xu's work has received many awards, including INFORMS Information Systems Society's Haim Mendelson Teaching Innovation Award (2023), American University's Outstanding Scholarship, Research, Creative Activity, and Other Professional Contributions Award (2022), MISQ Impact Award (2021) for her interdisciplinary privacy research, Woman of Achievement Award in IEEE Big Data Security (2021) for her outstanding research contributions and mentoring women in the field, IEEE ITSS Leadership Award in Intelligence and Security Informatics (2020) for her extensive scholarly and community-building efforts, the Operational Research Society's Stafford Beer Medal (2018) for her work on healthcare privacy, National Science Foundation's CAREER award (2010) for her work on digital privacy, and many best paper awards and nominations at various conferences.
- See Also
- Google Scholar
- Robust Analytics Lab
- For the Media
- To request an interview for a news story, call AU Communications at 202-885-5950 or submit a request.
Scholarly, Creative & Professional Activities
Selected Publications
Xu, H., and Zhang, N. (2023). An Onto-Epistemological Critique of Information Privacy Research, Information Systems Research, in press.
Zhang, N. Wang, M., Xu, H., Koenig, N., Hickman, L., Kuruzovich, J., Ng, V., Arhin, K., Wilson, D., Song, Q. C., Tang, C., Alexander, L., and Kim, Y. (2023). Reducing Subgroup Differences in Personnel Selection through the Application of Machine Learning, Personnel Psychology, in press.
Zhang, N., and Xu, H. (2023). Fairness of Ratemaking for Catastrophe Insurance: Lessons from Machine Learning, Information Systems Research, in press.
Xu, H., and Zhang, N. (2023). Privacy Implications of Blockchain Systems: a Data Management Perspective, Organizational Cybersecurity Journal: Practice, Process and People (3:1), pp. 71-79.
Xu, H., and Dinev, T. (2022). Reflections on The 2021 Impact Award: Why Privacy Still Matters, Management Information Systems Quarterly (46:4), xx-xxxii.
Xu, H., and Zhang, N. (2022). From Contextualizing to Context-Theorizing: Assessing Context Effects in Privacy Research, Management Science (68:10), 7383-7401.
Zhang, N., Wang, M., and Xu, H. (2022). Disentangling Effect Size Heterogeneity in Meta-analysis: A Latent Mixture Approach, Psychological Methods (27:3), 373–399.
Xu, H., and Zhang, N. (2022). Implications of Data Anonymization on the Statistical Evidence of Disparity, Management Science (68:4), 2600-2618.
Professional Services
Services for the Community-at-Large
- Member (2014-2016): National Privacy Research Strategy Forum (developed and drafted the National Privacy Research Strategy, released by the White House in 2016)
- Co-Chair (2016): Federal Privacy R&D Inter-agency Working Group, Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (
NITRD) Program - Member (2017-2018): Committee on Toward an Open Science Enterprise, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Editorial Board
- Associate Editor, Information Systems Research, Jan 2022 -
- Senior Editor, AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction, Dec 2021 -
- Associate Editor, IEEE Security & Privacy, Jan 2020 -
- Guest Co-Editor, Special Issue "Aging and Technology Use in the Era of Digitization and Automation", Work, Aging and Retirement, 2020 - 2022.
- Associate Editor, MIS Quarterly, Jan 2018 - Dec 2021