Kai Zhao is an assistant professor of AI and Machine Learning at the Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University. His research focuses on AI and Machine Learning. Specifically, he developed a research program focusing on understanding human behavior with computational methods, and modeling how the dynamics in human behaviors can shape and alter the dynamics of the AI system (Human-Centered AI). A crucial area of research in human-AI interaction focuses on understanding how the integration of AI into social systems influences human behavior, for example, how news-feeding algorithms affect people's voting decisions. However, little attention has been paid to how human behavior shapes AI performance. He fills this research gap by introducing computational methods to measure human behavior for the AI system. His guidance on the usage of AI, based on human behavior modeling, can potentially reduce environmental costs associated with large AI models such as ChatGPT and has a strong impact on society and industry.

He has published 31 top AI and data mining journals and conference proceedings, including IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, IEEE Transactions on Big Data, IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems, ACM Transactions on Data Science, Knowledge-Based Systems, Nature Scientific Reports, Information Sciences, IJCAI, EMNLP, CIKM, ICDM, and BigData. He also won the best paper award (1 in 150 submissions) at MobiQuitous in 2019 (A-level CS conference by CORE CS ranking 2020). His Google Scholar profile lists over 1,000 citations, including citations by articles in premier journals such as Nature and Nature Human Behaviour. Because of his research contribution to the data science and business field, he has been invited to serve as an associate editor at Electronic Commerce Research (Springer). His research has been featured in various major media outlets, including The Economist.