Sukhwa Hong, Associate Professor of Data Science and Business Administration

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Associate Professor Hong’s research focuses on using AI to enhance communication, emotional understanding, and ethical decision-making across various fields.

Business portrait of Sukhwa Hong with image of college building in the background.
Sukhwa Hong is based at the UH Hilo College of Business and Economics. (File photos/Keaohou/UH Hilo)

Posted April 17, 2025

Sukhwa Hong is an associate professor of data science and business administration at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo. He also is part of the Hawaiʻi Data Science Institute, a University of Hawaiʻi System statewide program that supports data intensive research, facilitates new degree and certificate programs that meet workforce needs (such as the new data science program at UH Hilo), and facilitates collaboration with industry.

Hong’s area of expertise is interdisciplinary, covering data science, business analytics, and sustainable practices, with a research focus on applying artificial intelligence to address real-world challenges. Specifically, he is investigating the use of AI for 1) better communication, specifically on climate change, 2) understanding people’s feelings and emotions such as optimism using AI, and 3) studying ethical and sustainable tourism using data science. He also is exploring AI for business communication and financial sentiment analysis.

“AI is often seen as invasive or unethical, but my research focuses on using AI to enhance communication, emotional understanding, and ethical decision-making across various fields,” says Hong, who is based at UH Hilo’s College of Business and Economics. “Rather than replacing human decision-making, AI should empower people, foster optimism and trust, and drive sustainable, ethical solutions. My goal is to bridge AI with human-centered applications that create meaningful societal impact.”

Associate Professor Hong received his master of science in industrial and systems engineering from the University of Florida (2011), and master of science in operations research focusing on industrial and systems engineering (2015) and a doctor of philosophy in business information technology (2019) from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

He arrived at UH Hilo in 2019, and received tenure and promotion to associate professor in 2024.

AI-driven approaches, interdisciplinary inquiries

Hong’s primary research focuses on AI-driven approaches for better communication, emotional understanding, and ethical decision-making.

“These contributions advance AI’s role in climate communication, ethical tourism, business analytics, and sentiment analysis, demonstrating how AI can be responsibly applied to improve decision-making and public understanding,” says Hong.

This work has application in several areas.

One application is in Hong’s development of AI-based knowledge mining and summarization systems to improve climate science communication. This work is a key component of a five-year $20-million National Science Foundation grant awarded in 2022 to several institutions across the state to fund data science research on the impacts of climate change in Hawaiʻi. The award is administered by the UH Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (Hawaiʻi EPSCoR) through a statewide multi-partner collaboration called Change HI. In this project, Hong is using large language models (commonly called LLMs) and text analytics to analyze public discourse on climate issues.

Hong is also investigating how AI can model optimism, emotions, and psychological well-being, and applying his findings to analyzing sentiment, trust, and emotional drivers in climate action, financial behavior, and decision-making.

This leads into Hong’s inquiry into ethical and sustainable tourism, using data science and AI to study visitor experiences, particularly in wildlife tourism and fandom-based travel where he is examining how ethical experiences impact psychological well-being, influencing tourism policies and consumer behavior. The findings provide valuable insights into promoting sustainable and culturally sensitive travel practices.

“My research on tourism ethics and AI-driven sentiment analysis has shown that experiences rooted in sustainability and ethical considerations, such as animal welfare in elephant tourism, strongly impact a traveler’s psychological well-being,” he says. “Using AI models to analyze online reviews and traveler emotions, I discovered that tourists who engage in ethical experiences report heightened levels of psychological fulfillment, emotional connection, and long-term advocacy for sustainable tourism.”

Hong says this suggests that sustainability and ethics are not just marketing tools, but fundamental drivers of consumer loyalty, emotional satisfaction, and behavioral change, which AI helps quantify at scale.

Hong is also exploring AI for business communication and financial sentiment analysis, where he examines sentiment in investor relations showing how AI can predict market responses and has developed AI-based text summarization models to enhance business decision-making.

Additionally, Hong has also developed a context map analysis framework for fake news detection and sentiment visualization. Context maps are used in data processing and analytics to visualize connections and relationships between data objects. The work of Hong and his co-authors is novel, using interactive visualization output “with the potential for rich analysis.”

“We feel that both our approach and its information extraction capabilities offer contributions to the fields of information and computer science as well as the social sciences,” concludes Hong and his co-authors in the study’s conclusion.

Unexpected findings: AI can effectively measure human emotions

Hong says the discovery that AI can reveal deep emotional and psychological patterns in human decision-making — particularly in ethics, sustainability, and sentiment-driven behaviors — was a particularly interesting finding.

In addition to finding through AI that ethical considerations impact a traveler’s sense of well-being, Hong was surprised with the discovery that optimism and sentiment in public discourse can be effectively measured using AI, revealing how emotions like hope, trust, and fear influence decision-making in areas such as climate action, finance, and risk perception.

“LLMs and machine learning models trained on public discourse, news articles, and social media posts have uncovered hidden patterns in how people express optimism and trust over time, showing that positive sentiment in large-scale data often correlates with proactive engagement in social and environmental causes,” Hong explains. “This insight challenges traditional sentiment analysis by showing that optimism is not just an emotional reaction, but a measurable factor in shaping real-world actions such as financial investments, sustainability choices, and public policy advocacy.”

AI models trained on diverse text sources also have revealed that human emotions are far more nuanced than traditional sentiment analysis suggests.

“My research shows that emotion-laden language — for example frustration mixed with optimism, skepticism combined with trust — creates highly complex decision-making patterns that AI can now detect and analyze at scale,” says Hong. “This has important implications for personalized AI communication, customer sentiment analysis, and ethical AI development, as it demonstrates that AI must go beyond binary positive [and] negative sentiment classifications to capture the full complexity of human emotions.”

“These findings highlight AI’s potential as a tool for understanding human emotions in ways that were previously difficult to quantify,” Hong adds. “Rather than replacing human intuition, AI enhances our ability to analyze emotions, predict behaviors, and design more effective communication strategies in tourism, climate action, finance, and beyond.”

Current research and looking ahead

Hong has several projects currently underway, some continuation of the projects discussed above and others in the planning stages.

  1. AI for Climate Science Communication: Enhancing AI-driven climate communication tools by summarizing vast climate research using LLMs and NLP models.
  2. Understanding Optimism and Emotion with AI: Developing AI models that analyze optimism in text to predict decision-making patterns.
  3. AI for Ethical Tourism: Using AI and sentiment analysis to measure ethical perceptions in tourism, particularly in wildlife conservation, space tourism, and fandom-based travel.
  4. RAG-based AI Assistants: Building document-focused AI chatbots that allow users to query research papers and receive contextually relevant, citation-backed responses.
  5. Discussions with the UH Hilo marine science department on analyzing and studying underwater video feeds using AI to understand how people react to underwater video streams.
  6. Discussions with the U.S. Geological Survey for monitoring and generating analytic reports using AI on Hawaiʻi volcano activities from USGS video feeds.
  7. And a grant application of Hong’s is currently under review through the Pacific Research and Education Platform (PREP), which aims to build a regional advanced research computing infrastructure to support AI and data-intensive research across Hawaiʻi and Guam. PREP will provide high-performance computing, GPU resources, and AI training for climate science, data analytics, and broader STEM education in the Pacific region.

Hong says his goals are to expand AI’s role in climate science communication that includes defining AI-driven tools for climate science knowledge mining to support policy-making and public engagement. He also plans to build AI models to understand human emotion, advancing AI-based sentiment analysis to predict optimism and emotional responses across different domains. And he has sights on enhancing ethical AI practices by contributing to the development of AI governance frameworks that ensure responsible AI deployment in education, business, and sustainability.

Also ahead is building on his current teaching and mentoring of UH Hilo students by growing the data science major at UH Hilo, strengthening AI and analytics education, ensuring students gain practical, interdisciplinary AI experience.

Mentoring students

Hong has been running the UH Hilo Summer Undergraduates Research Experience (SURE) program for nearly six years, providing undergraduate students with hands-on research opportunities in AI, data science, and business analytics. The program has covered a wide range of topics:

  • AI applications for Hawaiian language translation and cultural preservation
  • Machine learning for predicting student success and analyzing emotions in text
  • Sentiment analysis of climate change discourse and ethical tourism reviews
  • Developing AI-driven chatbots for education and business applications

In addition to mentoring undergraduate students, Associate Professor Hong also collaborates with graduate students from the UH Hilo tropical conservation biology and environmental science program and doctoral students from UH Mānoa, many of whom have co-authored papers and contributed to research projects. Their work has led to conference presentations at conference and other academic venues, preparing them for careers in AI, data science, and sustainability research.

“This mentorship is part of my broader commitment to expanding AI and data science education while providing students with real-world research experience and publication opportunities,” says Hong.

By Susan Enright, public information specialist for the Office of the Chancellor and editor of Keaohou and UH Hilo Stories. She received her bachelor of arts in English and certificate in women’s studies from UH Hilo.