Hengyun Neil Li
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Associate Professor Email: neilhengyun.li(at)polyu(dot)edu(dot)hk Office: TH502, School of Hotel and Tourism Management, 17 Science Museum Road, TST East, Kowloon, Hong Kong |
Short Bio
Dr. Hengyun (Neil) Li is a tenured Associate Professor in the School of Hotel and Tourism Management (SHTM) at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU). Since joining the faculty in August 2018, Dr. Li has brought a wealth of knowledge and expertise, having previously earned his Ph.D. and served as an instructor at the University of South Carolina, USA. His research delves into business intelligence and artificial intelligence, the platform economy, and multimodal big data analysis and prediction for the hospitality and tourism industry.
Dr. Li has developed extensive collaborations with international researchers and has made significant contributions to leading journals. His work has garnered over 7,000 citations, reflecting an h-index of 43, underscoring his significant impact in the field. His research has been prominently featured in leading journals and conferences in tourism/hospitality management, business administration and AI. He is one of the World’s Top 2% Most-Cited Scientists by Stanford University (2025 & 2024). Dr. Li is also the winner or finalist of five prestigious international conferences.
As a (Co-) principal investigator, Dr. Li has secured nearly 16 million Hong Kong dollars in research funding from esteemed organizations, including the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC-Young Scientist Found & General Program) twice, the Hong Kong Research Grant Council (RGC-GRF & ECS & DAG) on four occasions, the Hong Kong University Grants Committee (UGC), and the Hong Kong Scholars Program. His expertise is further recognized through his service on the editorial boards of seven top-tier academic journals, such as Tourism Management (ABS 4), Annals of Tourism Research (ABS 4), and the Journal of Travel Research (ABS 4).
Dr. Li's contributions have earned him accolades such as the “PolyU Faculty Outstanding Young Researcher” award from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, the “USC Breakthrough Graduate Scholar” recognition from the University of South Carolina, USA, and “Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) Fellowship Award” from the University of Surrey, UK. He has also been invited to share his research on business intelligence, hospitality/tourism big data and artificial intelligence at renowned universities and organizations worldwide, including Virginia Tech University, Pennsylvania State University, University of South Carolina, and University of Hawaii in the US; Zhejiang University, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Nankai University, and Southeast University in China; the Silk Road International University in Uzbekistan; and the Group NAO from Europe. His dedication to advancing the interdisciplinary fields of AI, business, and hospitality and tourism management continues to inspire and influence both academia and industry.
Research Interests [Google Scholar]
Utilizing Applied econometrics, Machine/Deep learning, and Experimental design to focus on:
Platform economy;
Small business survival analysis & prediction;
Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Interpretable AI;
Social technology: social media & social network.
>>> Dr. Li always looks forward to working with researchers and outstanding students in the broad field of big data analytics, user-generated content, and consumer psychology & behaviour. If you are interested in my research and want to the group as Postdoc/PhD/RA, please don't hesitate to send me an email with your CV and Transcripts. Please check this link for detials
News
- 2026
09/2026: I am pleased to welcome Qianwen from Nankai University to my team as a full-time PhD student. Welcome aboard!
08/2026: In collaboration with Ctrip, my journal paper entitled “Proactive prediction of pre-stay hotel service failures: Evidence from longitudinal field data across major holidays,” has been accepted for publication in the International Journal of Hospitality Management.
07/2026: I am delighted to deliver a series of workshops at the 2026 World Conference on Smart Tourism in Vietnam, the IAS and COVE Seminar hosted by the University of Surrey in the UK, and the Global Convergence Research Seminar hosted by Kyung Hee University in South Korea.
07/2026: I was awarded a GRF grant by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (RGC). Congratulations to Dr. Li on securing external grants (GRF/NSFC General Program) as PI for three consecutive years!
06/2026: One of my journal papers, entitled “Tourism development in the context of ecological transformation: The role of governments’ environmental protection attention,” has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism.
06/2026: I am glad to share that the paper co-authored by my PhD student, Ying (Aria) Jin, and me was nominated for the Best Research Paper Award at THE INC 2026 (Tourism, Hospitality & Events International Conference). Congratulations to Aria!
06/2026: I am honored to be invited by Annals of Tourism Research (an ABS 4 journal) as a special guest speaker for an online academic salon, entitled “When Randomization Is Impossible: Quasi-Experiments and Big Data Causal Inference.” Please stay tuned for further details.
06/2026: I am honored to have been awarded a grant under the “Joint PhD Supervision Scheme with Leading Universities 2025/26” for a project entitled Inferring Tourists’ Latent Needs from Multimodal UGC: A Generative AI Approach to Precision Tourism Marketing. A PhD student from a leading university will be hired as a research assistant to work with me on this project.
04/2026: One journal paper got accepted by Tourism Management entitled “Multimodal deep learning for tourism demand forecasting”.
04/2026: I was recognized as one of the “Top 100 Best Business and Management Scientists in China” for 2026 by Research.com.
04/2026: It is a great honor to be invited by the China Tourism Education Alliance to give a lecture entitled “Multimodal Data Analysis and Emotional Insights: Intelligent Exploration in Tourism and Hospitality Management.”
03/2026: I am pleased to welcome three new research assistants to my team: Junxin Hu (Tourism Management, University of New York), Baixin Li (Computer Science, University of Hong Kong), and Mingxin Jiang (Statistics, Dongbei University of Finance and Economics). Welcome aboard!
03/2026: I am delighted to announce that two software copyrights have been granted by the China Copyright Protection Center!
03/2026: I am happy to share that I have been invited to join the panel discussion on “Established Mid-Career Scholars Talks” at the 2026 World Conference on Smart Tourism in Da Nang, Vietnam.
02/2026: I am pleased to share that I have been invited to serve as Associate Editor for the journal Tourism Analysis (ABDC: A).
02/2026: I am delighted to announce that I have been invited to serve as the Academic Committee Chair for the 2026 World Conference on Smart Tourism (WCST)!
01/2026: One journal paper got accepted by Annals of Tourism Research entitled “Tourist expression heterogeneity in multimodal sentiment”. Congratulations to Jun and Jie!
01/2026: One conference paper got accepted by the 2026 ACM Web Conference (formerly known as the International World Wide Web Conference, abbreviated WWW) entitled “Securing your place in the review network: A dynamic embeddedness-aware graph neural network for restaurant survival prediction”. Congratulations to Yilong on his third first-author paper in a CCF A Top AI/CS conference!
01/2026: Congratulations to Dr. Li for having three first-author papers ranked among the Top 8 Most Cited Articles in Tourism Management [ABS4 Business Journal] and Annals of Tourism Research [ABS4 Business Journal] since January 2023.
01/2026: I was invited by PolyU SHTM and Hong Kong Hotel Association to deliver a 6-hours industry workshop at the 2026 Hong Kong PolyU Winter School on the topic of “AI-Augmented Dynamic Pricing and Revenue Optimization.”
- 2025
12/2025: I was awarded the Major Project of the Liaoning Province Economic and Social Development Research Project, Liaoning-Hong Kong-Macao Joint Project!
11/2025: Congratulations to Haipeng Ji, my third PhD student, on successfully passing his PhD viva oral defense and being awarded the PhD degree! Haipeng will soon embark on a new journey as a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the Business School of Xiamen University, a prestigious 985 Project university in China!
10-12/2025: I am delighted to deliver several research seminars at the University of Macau, Beijing Normal University-Hong Kong Baptist University, and Wuyi University!
09/2025: I was selected as World's Top 2% Most-Cited Scientists 2024 by Elsevier and Stanford University.
09/2025: I am delighted to announce that my PhD student, Huicai (Bella) Gao, has recently received PolyU PhD Thesis Award 2025 – Merit Award (Non-STEM Category) for her thesis titled “Forecasting Tourism Demand Using Big Data”. Congratulations to Huicai!
09/2025: I am delighted to announce that I have been awarded the 2025 Outstanding Early Career Researcher (Individual) Award in the category of Faculty/School Award – Research and Scholarly Activities at PolyU.
09/2025: I am delighted to announce that I have been awarded an Internal Research Grant in recognition of my School Award for Outstanding Achievement 2025 in Research and Scholarly Activities.
09/2025: I was awarded funding as a Co-Investigator under the Hong Kong Public Policy Research (PPR) Funding Scheme for the project entitled “Smart Mega Events: A Cross-city Comparative Analysis of Event Portfolios and Public Perceptions Using Online Data and Large Language Models.”
08/2025: My PhD student, Huicai Gao, who is currently a Senior Lecturer at the Lee Shau Kee School of Business and Administration, Hong Kong Metropolitan University, has received the SHTM Best PhD Thesis Award 2025. Additionally, Huicai has been shortlisted for nomination for the PolyU PhD Thesis Award 2025. Congratulations to Huicai!
07/2025: One journal paper got accepted by Tourism Management entitled “Coupling mobile positioning data and discrete choice model to decode travelers’ spatial choices within urban destinations”.
06/2025: I am honored to have been selected by the Selection Panel to receive the Research Excellence Award (Early Career Researcher) at the School of Hotel and Tourism Management (SHTM) level.
05/2025: I'm honored to have been interviewed by the BBC to share my insights on “How Chinese social media UGC and artificial intelligence influence consumer travel decisions and the viral 'world attractions’ online.” BBC Article.
05/2025: One journal paper got accepted by Journal of Travel Research entitled “Unveiling dynamic determinants of tourism competitiveness: Analysis integrating multimodal data and spatiotemporal machine learning”. Congratulations to Qiuhao!
05/2025: I'm thrilled to have been invited to deliver a research workshop for a group of students from YCYW International Schools. It's a wonderful opportunity to engage with bright young minds and share insights on “How to Do Scientific Research”.
05/2025: We are pleased to welcome Yilong as a full-time PhD student. Yilong holds a master's degree from Wuhan University's School of Computer Science, and his lead-author research has been featured at top AI conferences, including AAAI (Oral) and IJCAI.
05/2025: I’m honored to be invited by “World Salon X Columbia Global Dialogue (hosted by Columbia University in the USA)” to deliver a livestream talk on May 14th @ 18:00 - 19:00 EST. The topic will be “No Crew, No Camera, No Problem: The New Era of AI Video Marketing”. Stay tuned for more details!
05/2025: One journal paper got accepted by Tourism Management entitled “Unlocking the power of multimodal online reviews: A multisensory perspective”.
04/2025: I'm thrilled to be nominated for the “Faculty/School Outstanding Young Researcher” award! A heartfelt thank you to my colleagues for their support and recognition.
04/2025: I have the honor of being invited by “Tourism Management” (an ABS4 Journal) to deliver a livestream talk on the Tencent Meeting Platform on April 21st. The topic will be “Generative Artificial Intelligence in Tourism Management” Stay tuned for more details!
03/2025: One journal paper got accepted by Annals of Tourism Research entitled “Time and feature varying tourism demand forecasting: An ensemble learning–based meta-learner method”. Congratulations to Huicai!
03/2025: One journal paper got accepted by Tourism Management entitled “AI-infused video marketing: Exploring the influence of AI-generated tourism destination videos on tourist decision-making”.
03/2025: One journal paper got accepted by Tourism Management entitled “Generative Artificial Intelligence in Tourism and Hospitality Management: An Integrative Review and Roadmap for Future Research”.
02/2025: One journal paper got accepted by Annals of Tourism Research entitled “Tourism Combination Forecasting with Swarm Intelligence”.
01/2025: One journal paper got accepted by Journal of Travel Research entitled “Beyond Visual Appeal: The Impact of Multisensory Experience of Hotel Marketing and Review Images on Sales”.
- 2024
12/2024: I am pleased to announce that I have received the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) Fellowship Award from the University of Surrey, UK. This honor includes support for a visit to the university to conduct interdisciplinary research during the 2025-26 academic year.
12/2024: I was invited to give talks at the Zhejiang University–The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Joint Center and Southeast University respectively, titled: “Restaurant survival prediction using online customer-generated content and artificial intelligence”.
11/2024: My Master's student Jingbo James XI got the Best MSc Dissertation Award. Congratulations to James!
10/2024: I was invited to give a talk at the College of Tourism and Service Management at Nankai University entitled “The “Beauty Premium” Phenomenon: Appearance Discrimination in the P2p Market”.
10/2024: I was invited to speak at AI Opener's Industry sharing entitled: “AI for forecasting in tourism”.
10/2024: I was invited to chair a panel discussion at IMPACT2024 entitled “Digital transformation of tourism”.
09/2024: I was selected as World's Top 2% Most-Cited Scientists 2023.
09/2024: One journal paper got accepted by Tourism Management entitled “Restaurant survival prediction using machine learning: Does the variance and source of customer-generated online reviews matter?”
09/2024: I was awarded a grant from National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), General Program!
09/2024: The project “Multimodal Social Media Data Processing and Business Prediction Based on Multimodal Data” along with the candidate Dr. Xiaohong Pan has been selected for the prestigious Hong Kong Scholars Program 2024 (香江学者计划). Congratulations to Xiaohong!
09/2024: The project “Social Media Marketing Effectiveness Prediction: A Novel Deep Multimodal Fusion Approach” has been funded by the RCdTT Hotel ICON Grant.
09/2024: One journal paper got accepted by Annals of Tourism Research entitled “User-generated photos in hotel demand forecasting”.
07/2024: I was funded by GRF grant awarded by the Hong Kong Research Grant Council (RGC) entitled “An Artificial Intelligence-Empowered Micro- and Macro-Survival Prediction, Monitoring and Management Framework for Small Hospitality Businesses: An Interdisciplinary Perspective”.
07/2024: I was fund by Financial Support for Book Writing at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University entitled “Tourism and Hospitality Transformed: Navigating with Al and Big Data”.
- 2023
07/2023: I was starting a new position as Associate Professor at School of Hotel and Tourism Management, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University!