Dr Tao Chen Vice-Chancellor’s Studentship Award


Postgraduate Research Student
BSc (China University of Mining and Technology) MSc (Loughborough)
+44 07529972789

About

Managers are continuously looking for ways to improve their firms' competitive advantage in the face of global competition. In particular, firms in emerging countries have increasingly leveraged their non-market strategy to access external resources and sustain their competitive positions. Considering the importance of non-market strategy, he examines how firms improve their innovation by managing market and non-market strategies.

He received his MSc degree from Loughborough University and completed his bachelor’s degree at the China University of Mining and Technology. He has five-year work experience for an investment bank and investment corporation. He took the PhD Masterclass from Mark Casson and Alain Verbeke at the University of Reading. He is a teaching assistant and research assistant at the University of Surrey and the Univerisity of Sussex now. 

I am honored to have received the Vice-Chancellor’s Studentship Award and the Best Reviewer Award for the International Business and International Management Track at BAM 2023.

 

Research Interests:

Non-market strategy

Innovation

Sustainability

Affiliations and memberships

Academy of International Business

Publications

Meng Cui, Xubo Liu, Jinzheng Zhao, Jianyuan Sun, Guoping Lian, Tao Chen, Mark D. Plumbley, Daoliang Li, Wenwu Wang (2023)Fish Feeding Intensity Assessment in Aquaculture: A New Audio Dataset AFFIA3K and a Deep Learning Algorithm, In: 2022 IEEE 32nd International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP 2022)pp. 1-6 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)

Fish feeding intensity assessment (FFIA) aims to evaluate the change of fish appetite during the feeding process, which is potentially useful in industrial aquaculture. Previous methods are mainly based on computer vision techniques. However, these methods are limited by water refraction and uneven illumination. In this paper, we introduce a new approach for FFIA using audio. We create a new audio dataset for FFIA, namely AFFIA3K, which contains 3000 labelled audio clips of different fish feeding intensity (None, Weak, Medium, Strong). We present a deep learning framework for FFIA, where the audio signal is first transformed into acoustic features, i.e. mel spectrogram, then a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based model is used to classify the fish feeding intensity. Experimental results show that our approach achieves an mAP of 0.74 on the test set of AFFIA3K, and considerably outperforms baseline systems. This indicates the potential of our proposed approach in aquaculture applications.

Tao Chen, Hyeyoun Park, Tazeeb Rajwani (2024)Diverse human resource slack and firm innovation: evidence from politically connected firms, In: International Business Review33(2)102244 Elsevier

This study explores how political connections help firms promote innovation in emerging markets by facilitating the acquisition of required resources and knowledge and establishing collaborative relationships with external partners. Further, we emphasize that reconfiguration and acquisition of resources and knowledge are critical for firms to seize the opportunities by focusing on the role of human resource (HR) slack and state ownership in the innovation process. By specifying the HR slack based on the accumulated knowledge and experience of employees, we explain that the way firms integrate the resources and knowledge from political connections with an appropriate type of HR slack critically affects firm innovation. We also argue that state ownership strengthens the capabilities of politically connected firms to acquire resources and knowledge for firm innovation because political connections and state ownership enable firms to establish a dual pathway to access resources and knowledge. Based on data from 3,229 Chinese listed firms over a decade, our findings show the importance of highly-skilled HR slack to adequately allocate and absorb the resources and knowledge from political connections to foster firm innovation. The results also highlight the significance of state ownership in promoting innovation within politically connected firms.

Additional publications