MIS Research: Past, Present and Future (My Biased View)

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MIS Research Past, Present and Future(My
Biased View)
MIS
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My Background

• NCTU ? SUNY Buffalo ? NYU ? U Arizona (MIS 4)
• MS, MIS, Design Science, AI, Search Engine,
  Digital Library, Medical Informatics,
  Intelligence Security Informatics, Business
  Intelligence
• AI Lab, 25 researchers 25M funding
  (1.5M/year), 180 top SCI papers (20
  papers/year) DL (1), MIS (8) Scientific
  Advisor NLC, NLM, Academia Sinica Chair, ICADL,
  IEEE ISI
• AE in ten top SCI journals, IEEE and AAAS Fellow
• DL/SE GeneScene BioPortal COPLINK Dark Web
  (NYT, USA Today, Associated Press, etc.)
  Knowledge Computing Corporation (100M)

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MIS

• Management Information Systems

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What is MIS?

• Its in the name!
• Management
• Information
• Systems
• Not simply computer science, management science,
  organizational behavioral, economics modeling,
  etc

MIS
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MIS Past Departments and Founding Fathers
MIS

• University of Minnesota, founded in 1975
• University of Arizona, founded in 1977
• Dr. Gordon Davis, U of Minnesota ? Behavioral and
  Organizational Research
• Dr. Jay Nunamaker, U. of Arizona ? Systems and
  Technical Research
• Dr. Andy Whinston, U. of Texas at Austin, Purdue
  U. ? Economics and Modeling Research

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Top Five UA MIS Programs
MIS

• MIT economics, social, IT consulting
• CMU economics, MS/OR, social
• UT Austin economics, MS/OR
• Arizona system, technical
• Minnesota behavioral, organizational

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UA-MIS is highly ranked versus competitors and
has the broadest scope - Andersen Consulting
Report
Andersen Consulting 1999 Market Analysis
MIS
MBA Program 180 Students
BS Program 1100 Majors
UofA
Broad
Broad
NYU
UofA
Michigan
Michigan
Texas
ASU
Texas
MIT
MIT
ASU
Minnesota
Scope
Scope
Minnesota
Carnegie Mellon
Carnegie Mellon
U Penn
Narrow
Narrow
Ranking
High
Low
Ranking
High
Low
PhD Program 35 Students
MS Program 90 Students
NYU
UofA
UofA
Broad
Broad
NYU
Michigan
MIT
Texas
ASU
Minnesota
Scope
Scope
Illinois
Carnegie Mellon
Berkeley
Stanford
Irvine
Carnegie Mellon
Narrow
Narrow
Ranking
High
Low
High
Low
Ranking
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Major (Pure) MIS Journals
MIS

• MISQ Behavioral/Organizational
• Information Systems Research Behavioral,/Organiza
  tional, Economics, some Systems
• Management Science MS, Modeling, some Systems
• J of MIS Behavioral/Organizational, Economics,
  some Systems
• Decision Support Systems mostly Systems
• Others Decision Sciences, Information Systems,
  etc.

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Other Major MIS Related (Technical) Journals
MIS

• ACM CACM (IT), ACM Trans. On Information Systems
  (IR)
• IEEE Computer (IT), TKDE (database), SMC
  (cybernetics), TITB (biomedicine), Technology
  Management, Intelligent Systems (AI)
• ASIS JASIST
• Other technical journals IJHCS, IPM, JBI, etc.
• Others Many in Economics, Management, Management
  Science, Accounting, Finance, Marketing, etc.

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Major MIS Conference ICIS

• Managed by AIS
• 1000-1400 participants from US, Europe, and Asia
• High quality papers, job search
• 20 tracks, major submissions in behavioral,
  organizational, economics tracks
• ICIS 2008, Paris
• ICIS 2009, Phoenix, Arizona Conference Chairs
  Nunamaker and Currie Program Chairs Chen and
  Slaughter
• New tracks Web 2.0, Web Mining, Service
  Computing, Biomedical, etc.

MIS
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MIS Good

• IT the fabric of all organizations
• MIS has evolved from EDP (book keeping) to the
  backbone of all business operations
• MIS has matured as a discipline in breadth and
  depth
• MIS has become a department in most major
  business schools
• Major journals and conference well regarded
• Ph.D. students academic placement stable BS/MS
  students IT company placement good
• US faculty salary higher than peer groups (CS,
  Economics, Management, etc.)

MIS
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MIS Bad and Ugly

• MIS is not a major part of IT revolution
  computer science is (GDSS/TAM vs.
  PC/Unix/Internet)
• MIS has not gained respect in scientific academic
  world (little federal funding or contribution)
• MIS has not gained respect in businesses or
  business schools (little contribution or
  relevance to business TAM vs. CAPM IS dept
  removed from major b-schools)
• MIS discipline is narrow and in-breeding (MISQ
  and ISR too behavior and economics centric few
  MIS faculty are known outside of MIS)
• MIS curriculum is soft and out of date (few
  companies need behavioral or economics BS/MS
  graduates too much theory too little substance
  need to get back to core of M.I.S.)

MIS
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MIS Future and Opportunities

• MIS curriculum needs to be relevant to management
  (business subject courses, organizations),
  information (DBMS, data mining, knowledge
  management, Web contents), systems (supply-chain,
  ERP, Internet, Web 2.0 apps)
• MIS scholars need to go beyond MIS and compete in
  the broader academic world (CS, Economics,
  Management, etc.)
• MIS research needs to be relevant and useful to
  businesses
• MIS vs. CS ? Stick to our strengths management,
  information, and systems!!!

MIS
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MIS Future Recommendations

• Curriculum Some business and behavioral courses
  Need many hands-on database, web computing,
  business systems (CRM, ERP) courses Need hand-on
  development projects and interns
• Research What are the emerging topics (Web 2.0,
  forums/blogs, etc.)? NSF proposals and funding
  (innovative and fundable) Identify unique
  approach (systems vs. algorithms)
• Impact Work with other subject experts
  (business, biomedicine, security, etc.) Identify
  and solve new problems Is it news-worthy (NYT,
  USA Today, Newsweek)?

MIS
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MIS

• University of Arizona Management Information
  Systems

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Vision for UA-MIS

• To establish leadership in information
  technology education, research and outreach that
  accentuate innovation, hands-on experience and
  strategic values of information management,
  intelligence and technology.

MIS
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Historical Overview

• BS, MS and Ph.D. programs were first offered in
  1974.
• The department was established in 1977. 30th year
  celebration in 2004
• 15 faculty members, 45 Ph.D., 60 MS, 80 MBA, 600
  BS students
• Unique values of our program
• Successful innovations and technology transfer
• Hands-on learning about synergies among
  development, application and management
• Applied and relevant

MIS
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MIS Recognition
MIS

• US News World Report ranked among top 5
  programs for more than 15 consecutive years
• External Peer Review (1998) a jewel
• Decision Line rankings (1998, 1999)
• Dept. research productivity 1 by far
• Dr. Nunamaker 2
• Comm. of AIS (2005)
• Institution publication productivity 4
• Dr. Nunamaker 6 Dr. Chen 8

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Faculty

• 15 faculty members
• Total Research Funding 80 million
• Pioneers and leaders in
• Collaboration technology and science
• Knowledge management and artificial intelligence
• Large scale data management and mining
• Economics and technology management issues
• Featured in Fortune, Business Week, Forbes,
  Sciences and New York Times articles

MIS
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UA-MIS Board of Advisors

• Provide guidance and support
• Established in summer 1998
• Inkind, scholarship, infrastructure and fund
  donations exceeding 10 million
• Members include
• AOL, Ameristar Casinos, Andersen Consulting,
  Arthur Andersen, Cap Gemini, Cargill, Commerce
  One, Compaq, EMC2, Farmers Insurance, HP, Harvard
  Group, Honeywell, IBM, IFS, Intel, Oracle, PWC,
  Raytheon, RCM Technologies, SoftQuad, Ultralife
  Batteries

MIS
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Partnership Outcomes
MIS

• Mark and Susan Hoffman E-Commerce Lab
• Harvard Group and Honeywell Scholarships
• E-business Executive education program
• Specialized co-op program
• Student and faculty projects

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Major UA/MIS Research Centers
MIS

• Center for the Management of Information (CMI)
  Collaborative computing and deception detection
  research
• Artificial Intelligence Lab Knowledge management
  and web computing research
• Hoffman E-Commerce Lab E-Commerce and Internet
  computing research, education, outreach
• Advanced Database Research Group Data modeling
  and management research

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UA/MIS Research Focuses
MIS

• Technical/system artificial intelligence, web
  computing, GDSS, databases
• Management sciences/OR workflow, supply-chain,
  project management
• Information economics auctioning, modeling
• Social/behavioral/cognitive social impacts,
  computer-mediated communication, human-computer
  interactions (HCI)

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AI Lab Background
MIS

• Founded in 1989
• Excellence in Digital Library, Web Intelligence
  and Mining, Biomedical Informatics, and Security
  and Intelligence Informatics
• Funding, 25M federal (NSF, NIH, NIJ, DARPA,
  CIA, DHS, etc.) and industries (SAP, HP, IBM,
  etc.)
• 30 researchers 6 full-time researchers/staff,
  12 Ph.D. students, 12 MS/BS students (and 10
  affiliated faculty)
• Research infrastructure NT/UNIX/Linux
  workstations, servers, supercomputers (SGI)
  Java/C/C, DBMS (Oracle/MS SQL), web protocols

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AI Lab Research Methodologies
MIS

• Databases, knowledge bases, ontologies (Database)
• Data mining and statistical analysis (Algorithm)
• Text mining and natural language processing
  (Linguistics)
• Web mining, search engines, and recommender
  systems (Web)
• Information systems design and human-computer
  interactions (HCI)
• Visualization and human factors (Visualization)
• System evaluation (Evaluation)

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AI Lab Projects Web Intelligence and Mining
MIS

• Digital library, intelligent searching,
  multi-lingual support, post-retrieval analysis,
  knowledge map visualization
• Scientific portals NanoPort (for Nano
  Technology), DGPort (for digital government)
• Intelligence portals (English/Chinese) business
  intelligence and medical intelligence,
  Spanish/Arabic
• CMC visualization by Glyphs, MDS/SOM
  visualization for financial management and
  Internet survey, financial data/text mining,
  GetSmart e-learning concept map, recommender
  systems

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AI Lab Projects Biomedical Informatics
MIS

• Biomedical data and text mining, gene pathway
  analysis, medical ontologies, GeneArray analysis,
  biosurveillance
• HelpfulMed and MedTextus Arizona Pathway
  Visualizer BioPortal for disease informatics
• Gene pathway text mining, computational
  linguistics, GeneArray data mining, clustering,
  Medical knowledge visualization, pathway modeling
  and display
• Infectious disease and bioagent information
  sharing, analysis, and visualization, hotspot
  analysis, spatio-temporal visualization

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Medical Informatics The computational,
algorithmic, database and information-centric
approach to the study of medical and health
care problems.
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AI Lab Projects Intelligence and Security
Informatics
MIS

• Public safety and intelligence information
  sharing and analysis, social network analysis,
  data/text mining
• COPLINK, BorderSafe, Dark Web
• Criminal and terrorism social network analysis
  (SNA) centrality, block-modeling, clustering
• Criminal and terrorism data/text mining criminal
  element association mining and clustering (time,
  place, objects) deception detection
• Terrorism link, content, authorship, sentiment
  analysis

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• Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI)
• Development of advanced information technologies,
  systems, algorithms, and databases for national
  security related applications, through an
  integrated technological, organizational, and
  policy-based approach.

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Research Opportunities

• Ph.D. Program excellent GPA (top 5 in class),
  strong GRE/GMAT (top 5), strong research record,
  strong faculty personal recommendation (18,000
  annual financial support, 5 years) ? become
  professor (100,000 2/9)
• MS Program good GPA and GRE/GMAT (top 10), good
  recommendation (good chance for financial support
  after first semester, 14,000 per year, 2 years)
  ? become IT professional (60,000)
• Need good to excellent English communication
  skills (speaking and writing)
• Joint faculty research, sabbatical exchange,
  visitor program

MIS
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• ICIS 2009 program participation and involvement
  opportunities!!!
• Faculty visit and collaboration opportunities!!!
• Recruiting new Ph.D. and MS Students!!!

MIS
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For more information
MIS

• Eller College http//eller.arizona.edu
• AI Lab http//ai.arizona.edu
• Hsinchun Chen hchen_at_eller.arizona.edu