L. Mahlon Harrell Fellow Professor of Accounting and Information Systems Professor of Computer Science (Courtesy) Virginia Tech 3007 Pamplin Hall, Blacksburg, VA 24061-0101  Email: wfan AT vt DOT edu

Patrick is a full professor in the Accounting and Information Systems Dept. and the Computer Science Dept. (by courtesy) at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. 

His research interests include data mining, text mining (text summarization, classification, filtering, and categorization), knowledge management, and business intelligence. Recently, he has been working on several new areas related to social informatics, capital markets, and financial fraud detection using text mining techniques. He has published more than 100 refereed journal and conference papers. His research has appeared (or will appear) in journals such as Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Information Systems, Communications of the ACM, Journal of the American Society on Information Science and Technology, Information Processing and Management, Decision Support Systems, ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, Pattern Recognition, IEEE Intelligent Systems, Pattern Recognition Letters, International Journal of e-Collaboration, and International Journal of Electronic Business.

His text mining research (ranking function discovery for search engine optimization, question answering on the Web, text summarization, etc.) has been cited more than 1500 times according to Google Scholar. His research on financial fraud auditing using automatic textual analysis has been mentioned numerous times in different online and news media (including Richmond Times, CFO magazine). His research has been or currently being funded by five NSF grants, one PWC grant, and one KPMG grant.

Patrick is the co-founder of Facet Analytics LLC, a new startup company that delivers the next generation Web services for financial statement fraud risk assessment.