Michel Ballings

Michel Ballings is an assistant professor in the department of Business Analytics and Statistics at the Haslam College of Business, University of Tennessee. He is also the president of the INFORMS Social Media Analytics Section. He holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Leuven University College, a master’s degree in business economics from VLEKHO Business School Brussels, and a Ph.D. in applied economic sciences from Ghent University. He has published eighteen articles in peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Marketing, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and Decision Sciences. His research agenda focuses on improving financial business outcomes through the development of end-to-end machine learning systems for large-scale data. Embedded in this development effort is the question ‘What is the optimal sequence of marketing actions with respect to long-term business performance?’. Michel teaches data engineering, deep learning, and deep reinforcement learning. He has been awarded excellence in teaching and commitment awards in 2014, 2016, 2019, and 2020, and has a successful track record raising research funds from industry. Contact Michel at mb@utk.edu.