Keri Larson

I recently joined the department of Management, Information Systems, and Quantitative Methods at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) as an Assistant Professor of Information Systems. I hold a PhD in Management Information Systems from the University of Georgia and an AB in Law, Letters, and Society from the University of Chicago.

My primary research focuses on firm-level effects of social media. Particularly, I am interested in how organizations should best approach the measurement problem of analyzing massive volumes of highly unstructured text in real time, such as that generated by consumers across social media platforms. A likely answer to this problem lies in the fields of Natural Language Processing and Statistical Machine Learning, technologies capable of enabling the contextual automated analysis of highly unstructured textual data.

As an academic, I hope to engage in research that will ultimately benefit business practice. For example, I anticipate providing social media managers with the ability to measure the sentiments, concerns, and suggestions of their customers in a more meaningful way than is currently possible.

My secondary research interests include generative innovation in health care, for which I received a research grant in 2011, and changes in organizational identity brought about by IT/IS.

I have taught or am currently teaching Data Management, Intro to Information Systems, Project Management, and Social Media and Virtual Communities in Business. I received an outstanding teaching award from the University of Georgia in 2011.

My husband Tommy works for Viva Health as their Performance Improvement Program Manager, and our four-year-old son Soren works as a super-awesome and extremely busy preschooler. We currently live in the charming village of Homewood, Alabama.