Dr. Xianrong (Shawn) Zheng is an Associate Professor of Information Technology, Old Dominion University (ODU), Norfolk, Virginia, United States. Dr. Zheng also holds a joint appointment from ODU's School of Cybersecurity. Dr. Zheng received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, in 2014. His research interests are AI, Cloud Computing, Data Science, and FinTech. He was nominated as "The Most Inspirational Faculty Member" by ODU's Top Scholars in 2024 and 2025. Dr. Zheng is a Member of Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He is a Technical Program Committee Member of ACM International Conference on AI in Finance (ICAIF), an Editorial Board Member of International Journal of Data Science (IJDS) and Journal of Risk and Financial Management (JRFM), and the Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of Web Portals (IJWP), etc. Also, he is the Guest Editor of JRFM's Special Issue on “Investment Data Science with Generative AI”.