Researcher focused on effects of emerging technologies joins Alberta School of Business

By sensing, early on, that cryptocurrency should be studied, Bryan Spencer saw his PhD research uncover both sophisticated market manipulation and a surprising outcome.

On July 1, Spencer became an assistant professor in the Alberta School of Business’s department of strategic entrepreneurship and management. In late summer, he expects to publish a paper that exposes market manipulation in the cryptocurrency market and how it was discovered.

The story starts in 2017, at the beginning of his doctoral studies, when Spencer decided to study cutting-edge technologies that have the potential to have a big impact on society. He’d become intrigued with social and economic research during a study-abroad stint at China’s Nanjing University, where he subsequently earned his master’s in that field (and incidentally, learned to speak Mandarin.)

“I’m really interested in how emerging technologies influence how people work and organize,” says Spencer.

So, despite skepticism from many over whether cryptocurrency would matter much in the future, Spencer accepted an invitation to join and observe an online group of investors who were working together to identify investment opportunities, share information and develop trading strategies.

“But a small group of people from this larger group realized they could simply make up information and spread it online to profit,” says Spencer.

Although he was following the group while this was occurring, he was unaware of the fraud. Only upon examining the data afterward did Spencer and his co-author realize that the rogue group was using coded language to discuss the market manipulation they were conducting against a major online cryptocurrency community.

“They would do it again and again, but every time they did it, it was less effective,” says Spencer. As they developed their paper, the researchers saw that members of the online community were learning from traces of manipulative actions, even though they couldn’t directly observe the secret plotting.

“This goes to a broader societal problem we’re facing,” says Spencer. “How can you learn to combat fake news? How are people able to disentangle what is real and what is not?”

Spencer and his co-author, Claus Rerup from the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, address this issue in their research.

Spencer will be bringing his experiences from the study to bear in the MBA course, Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility, which he’ll be teaching in the winter.

He’ll also be helping contribute to a new course, Strategic Decision-Making with Data Analytics, which will benefit from another of his research studies. It examined why AI tools performed well on paper but were inaccurate when put to work by medical students and residents who were using them to help diagnose diseases.

The significance of the kind of research in which Spencer specializes — on-the-ground field research about emerging technologies — is that “you can see how people experience things and how that influences their day-to-day work, instead of waiting to look at stats 10 year later.”

He’s delighted to have joined the Alberta School of Business because, “in the SEM (strategic entrepreneurship and management) department there’s a very strong group of faculty studying technology and data science and what I do is complementary to that.

“And the U of A has a world-class AI and machine learning research group. The university as a whole is training people in data analytics. I think my experiences and background can add a lot to that.”