Lally School of Management doctoral students Yuanyuan Liu and Kofi Arhin presented their respective research at the Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Business Analytics Conference at Harvard Business School in December.

Liu and her colleagues explored using bots to play video games with new, inexperienced participants as they develop their skills. New player onboarding is considered critical to a game’s success. Bots better aid skill development over grouping new players with other players. However, players miss out on the social aspect with bots. Overall, Liu found that bots increase engagement, but impede player social assimilation. Ultimately, bots had a negative effect on engagement post-graduation.

Arhin and his team examined the effect of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning in personnel assessment and selection. Although using algorithms saves considerable time and money, discrimination toward underrepresented groups is a pervasive challenge. Efforts to improve fairness have largely relied on incorporating demographic information. Arhin proposed an alternative: assessing the semantic similarities between the responses of job candidates and experts in their fields. His research proved this method would increase fairness.