About Me

I am Zhaoqi “ZQ” Cheng, a PhD candidate at the Questrom School of Boston University. I obtained my bachelor’s degree at Tsinghua University and master’s degree at Carnegie Mellon University. I work with my advisor Dokyun Lee at the BIT Lab. Here is my CV.

I combine NLP models with econometric models to obtain interpretable representation of multimodal contents that are deemed “creative”, and examine their economic, technological or social impact.

In particular, I use generative models to characterize patent filings, and work on subsequent research questions on various topics, such as firm innovation strategy over the business cycle, and antitrust implications of mergers and acquisitions in nascent technological areas.

---

Research Projects

InnoVAE: Generative AI for Understanding Patents and Innovation
Zhaoqi Cheng, Dokyun Lee, Prasanna Tambe
Presented at CIST 2020, INFORMS WDS 2020 and WISE 2020
Prepared for resubmission to Management Science [SSRN]

M&A and Innovation: A New Classification of Patents
Zhaoqi Cheng, Ginger Zhe Jin, Mario Leccese, Dokyun Lee, Liad Wagman
Presented at ASSA 2023 Annual Meeting
Available at AEA Papers and Proceedings [AEA]

FCM: Interpretable Deep Learning for Text Exploration
Dokyun Lee, Zhaoqi Cheng, Emaad Manzoor
Under review at Information Systems Research [SSRN][Poster]

The less tangled web: Why AI should practice deceit less than humans
Tae Wan Kim, Joy Lu, Kyusong Lee, John Hooker, Zhaoqi Cheng, Yanhan Tang
Presented at SBE Annual Meeting 2021
Prepared for resubmission to Minds and Machines [arXiv]