Mr Chixiao Lu

Profile

I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Analytics, Technology and Operations Department at Leeds University Business School. I am also completing my PhD in Business and Management at the University of Surrey.

Before joining Leeds, I worked as a part-time Research Fellow at Surrey on the EPSRC-funded DECaDE project. I hold an MSc in Business Analytics from the University of Bristol and a BSc in International Business Economics from the University of Nottingham Ningbo China.

Research interests

My research lies at the intersection of operations research, production economics and business analytics, with a particular focus on productivity and efficiency analysis. I develop mathematical optimisation and nonparametric methods to evaluate organisational performance, identify feasible improvement targets and support resource allocation.

A central strand of my work advances data envelopment analysis (DEA) and network production models. I examine how interdependencies, restricted reconfiguration and uncertainty affect performance across interconnected production stages. My research also addresses environmental performance, including the modelling of undesirable outputs and the trade-offs between economic activity and pollution reduction.

My current research focuses on AI–data supply chains. I investigate how data, models, computing infrastructure and service providers interact in the production and delivery of AI services. Using nonparametric production analysis to estimate the attainable cost–accuracy frontier, I examine how AI service providers can combine data sources, select models and allocate computing resources to minimise the cost of achieving a required level of predictive accuracy.

Research groups and institutes

• Centre for Operations and Supply Chain Research