Malek Ben Sliman

I am a fifth year Ph.D. Candidate in the Marketing division at the Graduate School of Business, Columbia University (CU). My research lies in the application of state-of-the-art techniques in statistics, machine learning, computer vision and NLP in the context of art valuation, social networks, marketing analytics and online retailing.

For my dissertation, I develop an art evaluation model based on paintings’ aesthetics, novelty, influence, and artists’ historical market value. Specifically, I summarize paintings into a low dimensional representation space built using deep learning models (variational autoencoder) and quantify artistic novelty and influence by leveraging visual similarity between paintings using social network analysis.

I was born and raised in Tunisia. I moved to Paris to study Mathematics and Physics at Lycée Louis Le Grand and continued on to École Centrale Paris, where I studied engineering. In my final year at Centrale, I studied at CU as part of a double-degree and graduated with both an M.S. in Operations Research from the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research department and an M.S. in Industrial Engineering from École Centrale Paris. During my time in France, I have been awarded an Excellence-Major Scholarship by the French Government. More recently, I have received a Luxury Education Foundation Award for my work on art valuation and was nominated as an AMA-Sheth Foundation Doctoral Consortium Fellow by the Marketing department at CU.

In addition to my scholarly pursuits, I had also been elected President of the Wine Club of Ecole Centrale Paris, which organizes bi-monthly wine tastings. I also have served as the Vice-President and Co-founder of the Centrale Cricket Club. During my spare time, I enjoy playing tennis, watching sports, baking, and tasting spirits and liquor.

Papers

• The Extended Directed Friendship Paradox

  • Coauthor(s): Ben Sliman, Malek and Rajeev Kohli

• R2M Index 1.0: Assessing the Relevance to Marketing of Academic Marketing Research

  • Coauthor(s): Jedidi, Kamel, Bernd Schmitt, Malek Ben Sliman and Yanyan Li

• Adaptive Customization

  • Coauthor(s): Ben Sliman, Malek, Khaled Boughanmi and Rajeev Kohli

• Leveraging the Friendship Paradox for Seeding in Asymmetric Networks

  • Coauthor(s): Ben Sliman, Malek and Rajeev Kohli

Awards

• AMA-Sheth Foundation Doctoral Consortium Fellow, 2019
• ISMS Doctoral Consortium Fellow, 2018
• Ph.D. Program Fellowship, Columbia University, (2015 - Present),
  
• IEOR Outstanding Student Service Award, 2014
• Excellence-Major Scholarship, (2008-2013),

Research Interests

• Social Networks
• Diffusion of Information and Word-of-Mouth
• Art Valuations
• Graph Theory
• Empirical Modeling
• Unstructured Data