Zaki Malik, Ph.D.

Department Head/Professor of Business Analytics

A Conversation with Dr. Malik

Why do you like teaching?

The opportunity to interact with college students and faculty members with various interests and backgrounds is a prime factor for me to pursue a career in academia. I am firmly of the opinion that the teaching methods we adopt have a great impact on the ability of students to absorb course materials as well as their perception about learning, knowledge and science. Inspirational learning has always been my motto since I joined academia in 2009. It aims at promoting a learning environment that motivates students.

Why did you choose your discipline?

My BS, MS, and PhD degrees are all in Computer Science. In the 90s, computer systems were slowly becoming ubiquitous, so it was a natural choice to pursue a discipline that had a bright future.

Tell us about a project you are working on or have completed.

We recently published a paper for extracting a weighted taxonomy of products from a Twitter feed. Nowadays, even before a new product comes to the market, or is to be announced, like at an Apple or Google event, users start the rumors/talk about the product design or specifications, and their expectations of it. With all this discussion, it is not only the product that affects the future success of the product but various other factors that can directly or indirectly influence the user's perspective. In this work, we present an approach to extract the most important concepts related to a product, being discussed on Twitter. We believe that this weighted taxonomy can be used to predict the success of the product even before the official release, and align marketing resources, etc. in a beneficial manner.

What did you want to be when you were a child?

An Army Commando (Arnold Schwarzenegger's movies left an imprint).

Why would you encourage a student to attend A&M-Commerce?

You cannot beat the affordable, world-class education in a very promising/happening geographical location. We are positioned in close proximity to a major metro area while being a small college town.

Educational Background

• Ph.D., Computer Science, Virginia Tech, 2008
• M.S., Computer Science, Virginia Tech, 2004
• B.S. Computer Science, Wichita State University, 2001

Activities and Awards

• Member INFORMS, AIS, IEEE, ACM
• Best Paper Award. IEEE ICICS (2016), IEEE ICWS (2015), ICE2T (2014).

Research Interests

• Service Computing
• Business Analytics
• Reliable Distributed Systems
• Social Networks
• Web Databases
• Semantic Integration Systems

Selected Publications

• A. Alhosban, Z. Malik, and B. Medjahed. A Sustainable Self-Healing Framework for Big Data in Service-oriented Systems. ACM Transactions on the Web (TWeb), to appear 2020.
• Z. Malik, E. Najmi, K. Hashmi, M. Mustafa Rafique, and A. Rezgui. Product Weighted Taxonomy Extraction using Twitter. International Journal of Business Information Systems (IJBIS), to appear 2019.
• H. Aljafer, Z. Malik, K. Hashmi, and M. Rafique, Profit Maximization in Long-Term e-Service Agreements. International Journal of Business Information Systems (IJBIS), to appear 2019.
• Z. Malik, K. Hashmi, E. Najmi, and A. Rezgui, Wisdom Extraction in Knowledge-based Information Systems. Journal of Knowledge Management (JKM), https://doi.org/10.1108/JKM-05-2018-0288, Vol. 23 Issue: 1, pp.23-45, January 2019.
• A. Mirzaeinia, A. Rezgui, Z. Malik, and M. Mirzaeinia. Min-Edge P-cycles: An Efficient Approach for Computing P-cycles in Optical Data Center Networks. 12th International Conference on Cloud Computing (CLOUD 2019), San Diego, CA, USA, June 2019.
• R. P. Mohammadiani, abd Z. Malik. The Effects of Interactivity of Electronic Word of Mouth Systems on Value Creation Practices on Social Media. American Marketing Association Winter Academic Conference, Austin, TX. USA, February 2019.

Featured Courses

• BUSA 533 Cyber Security and IT Auditing
• BUSA 539 Cyber Forensics & Info. Security Policy Governance
• BUSA 537 Advanced Analytics