Milad Hour is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Fairfield University's Dolan School of Business. He earned his Ph.D. in Marketing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His research focuses on audience engagement, examining which types of texts, such as tweets posted by brands or fans, attract more likes, comments, or retweets, and which types of news articles keep readers engaged. He studies thousands of news articles, millions of song lyrics, and millions of tweets. Like all of us, he doesn't have enough time to read those texts one by one and extract features like emotions from them. That is why he uses text mining techniques, machine learning methods, and big data analysis to analyze his large datasets. One of his findings reveals that people comment more on negative news compared to positive news. Isn't it interesting? People share something positive to show their positive image to others, but when something is negative, they will say something about it rather than sharing it!

To access data, Milad uses web scraping and APIs. In web scraping, Milad creates a robot like WALL-E, who, rather than cleaning up the planet, browses websites, extracts information, and compiles it into a file. He also collects data from Twitter and iSpot TV using APIs, which require coding to use effectively. These APIs are, however, a little more sophisticated like EVE which holds the collected datasets in her chest rather than the plant!

Milad is passionate about teaching and believes that the best way to learn something is to teach it. He has taught Principles of Marketing, Business-to-Business Sales and Marketing, and Marketing Research.

He worked in a B2B company for six years as a market researcher, which helped him gain insight into real-world business issues in the classroom. He earned his MBA from Kharazmi University and his bachelor's degree in Metallurgical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran. By the way, if you cannot find him at school, whether it is a cold day in winter or a hot day in summer, you will probably see him running on the streets or hiking with his better half, Goli.

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