TBA = to be announced

Talk Descriptions

Speaker: Professor Moez Limayem HEC Lausanne, Switzerland

Abstract

The use of the Internet as a shopping and purchasing medium has seen exceptional growth. Electronic commerce (EC) has emerged as the most important way of doing business for years to come. However, selling in cyberspace is very different from selling in physical markets, and it requires a critical understanding of consumer behavior and how new technologies challenge the traditional assumptions underlying conventional theories and models. A critical understanding of this behavior in cyberspace, as in the physical world, cannot be achieved without a good appreciation of the factors affecting the purchasing and repeated purchasing decisions. If e-marketers know how consumers make these decisions, they can adjust their marketing strategies to fit this new way of selling in order to convert their potential customers to real ones and retain them. Similarly, web designers, who are faced with the difficult question of how to design webpages to make them not only popular but also effective in increasing sales and consumers' retention, can benefit from such an understanding.

A better understanding of the behavior of purchasing and repeated purchasing through the Web is a prerequisite for assuring successful implementation of electronic commerce initiatives. This raises the questions of under what conditions will consumers most likely buy goods and services through the Web? And when will they stick to the same website to buy over and over again. Getting answers to these questions is particularly important because many companies are making significant investments in implementing electronic commerce systems without a good grasp of the factors affecting purchasing and repurchasing through the web. The overall objective of this presentation is to present the preliminary findings of a research project aimed at enhancing our understanding of online purchasing and repeated purchasing behavior through theory extension and scale development. Specifically, the results of several studies and their implications to theory and practice will be discussed.

CV

Dr. Moez Limayem is a professor and the director of the Master in Business Information Systems at HEC, Lausanne University in Switzerland. Until recently, he was a professor and the BBA Electronic Commerce program coordinator at the Information Systems department of the City University of Hong Kong. He was also the chair of the Management Information Systems department at Laval University in Canada. He holds an MBA and a Ph.D. in MIS from the University of Minnesota, USA. His current research interests include IT adoption and usage, CRM, Knowledge Management and electronic commerce. He has had several articles published in many journals such as MIS Quarterly, Management Science, Information Systems Research, Communications of the ACM, IEEE Transactions, Accounting, Management & Information technologies, Group Decision and Negotiation, and Small Group Research. Dr Limayem is on the editorial board of MIS Quarterly and several other international journals. He is also the program co-chair for ICIS 2008 to be held in Paris. He has been invited to present his research in many countries in North America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and in the Middle East. He won the best MIS paper award at the ASAC conference in 1998 and the ICIS conference in 2003.

In 1994, Professor Limayem won the prestigious HERMES award for excellence in teaching. In 1995 and 1998, he won the award for the best MIS teacher in the Faculty of Business Administration at Laval University, and he recently received the 3M award of the best teacher in Canada. In November 2001, he won the Teaching Excellence Award at City University of Hong Kong. In January 2003 and October 2004, he received the best teacher award of the Information Systems Department at City University of Hong Kong.

Dr. Limayem has more than 14 years of experience in executive training in the USA, Canada and Hong Kong. He is the highest rated Executive MBA instructor at City University of HK, Concordia University (Montreal Canada), and at Laval University (Quebec, Canada). Dr. Limayem also acts as a consultant for the UNESCO and several private and public companies. His consultancy services cover e-Government, e-Commerce, Business Process Reengineering and Customer Relationship Management.

Speaker: Andreas Zeller, Saarland University

Abstract

Was sorgt dafür, dass Programme fehlschlagen? Wir haben die Fehlerdatenbanken von Microsoft durchforstet - und herausgefunden, dass bestimmte Programmeigenschaften die Wahrscheinlichkeit von späteren Fehlern signifikant steigern. Welche Eigenschaften das sind, und welche Konsequenzen man daraus ziehen sollte, erläutert dieser Vortrag.

Speaker: Professor Jochen Schiller, FU Berlin

Abstract

Much has already been written about Wireless Sensor Networks or WSNs for short. Many new research projects propose WSNs as the solution for flexible and robust environmental monitoring, building surveillance, container, animal, or people tracking etc. New books covering the subject as well as new conferences dedicated to WSNs appear. So what is special about WSNs? What makes them different from other networks? What are still open questions and challenges for research? This talk will put WSNs in the right perspective as an evolution of ad-hoc networks in combination with miniaturization, new radio technologies, and new energy sources. Highlighting the specific characteristics of WSNs the talk will give many examples of real WSNs, sensor components, algorithms, management strategies, and programming paradigms. Furthermore, the difference between real projects and visions, real components and visionary hardware/software is shown. The talk closes with a list of open issues and research challenges, and points out the required knowledge for WSN research that brings together HW engineers, SW developers, miniaturization experts, as well as integration specialists.

CV

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jochen H. Schiller (schiller@inf.fu-berlin.de) is head of the working group Computer Systems & Telematics at the Institute of Computer Science, Freie Universitaet Berlin, Germany. Dr. Schiller studied Computer Science at the University of Karlsruhe where he also got his PhD in 1996 (summa cum laude). Afterwards he joined Uppsala University, Sweden, for teaching and cooperating in several research projects. After being a guest professor at ETS Montreal, Canada, and Kiel University, Germany, Dr. Schiller got his habilitation and published the book "Mobile Communications" that is currently used by over 200 universities as text book. Since April 2001 he is full professor at the Freie Universitaet Berlin, Germany, and since 2002 he is Vice Director of the Institute of Computer Science. In April 2003 Dr. Schiller became Dean of the Department for Mathematics and Computer Science. His research focus is on wireless, mobile, and embedded devices, communication protocols, operating systems for devices with small footprint, and quality of service aspects in communication systems. Up to now, Dr. Schiller published 5 books and more than 100 international papers. His book "Mobile Communications" is available in 5 languages. In 2005 he co-founded the company ScatterWeb GmbH focusing on Wireless Sensor Networks for industrial applications.

Speaker: Professor Schahram Dustdar, TU Wien

Abstract

Today we are experiencing a major paradigm shift in the way that software applications are designed, architected, delivered, and consumed. Service-oriented Computing (SoC) is a new emerging paradigm for distributed computing that has evolved from object-oriented and component computing to enable building agile networks of collaborating applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries. Services are autonomous platform-inde­pen­dent computational elements that can be described, published, discovered, orchestrated and pro­grammed using XML artifacts for the purpose of developing massively distributed interoperable applications. In this talk we will discuss the current state of Service-oriented Computing and outline future research challenges.

CV

Schahram Dustdar is Full Professor for Internet Technologies at the Distributed Systems Group, Information Systems Institute, Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien) where he is director of the Vita Lab and Honorary Professor of Information Systems at the University of Groningen (RuG), The Netherlands.

He received his M.Sc. (1990) and PhD. degrees (1992) in Business Informatics (Wirtschaftsinformatik) from the University of Linz, Austria. In April 2003 he received his Habilitation degree (Venia Docendi in Angewandte Informatik) for his work on Process-aware Collaboration Systems - Architectures and Coordination Models for Virtual Teams. His work experience includes several years as the founding head of the Center for Informatics (ZID) at the University of Art and Industrial Design in Linz (1991-1999), Austrian project manager of the MICE EU-project (1993 - 97), and director of Coordination Technologies at the Design Transfer Center in Linz (1999 - 2000). While on sabbatical leave he was a post-doctoral research scholar (Erwin-Schrödinger scholarship) at the London School of Economics (Information Systems Department) (1993 and 1994), and a visiting research scientist at NTT Multimedia Communications Labs in Palo Alto, USA during 1998.

Since 1999 he works as the co-founder and chief scientist of Caramba Labs Software AG (CarambaLabs.com) in Vienna, a venture capital co-funded software company focused on software for collaborative processes in teams. Caramba Labs was nominated for several (international and national) awards: World Technology Award in the category of Software (2001); Top-Startup companies in Austria (Cap Gemini Ernst & Young) (2002); MERCUR Innovationspreis der Wirtschaftskammer (2002).

 

Speaker: H. Schweppe FU Berlin Institute of Computer Science

Most of the information stored in digital form is burried in natural language texts. As opposed to text understanding, a traditional subfield of artificial intelligence, fact extraction aims at finding those facts which conform to a predefined specification, given for example by a database schema. The notion of fact extraction, although slightly more specific, is often used interchangeably with information extraction. Text mining, however, is a more general technique aiming at finding unanticipated information.

We will present two kinds of algorithms, both of which are based on machine learning techniques employing supervised learning. The incremental statistical method only utilizes statistical features of the input. We have developed an incremental technique based on the Winnow classifier using joint input features of the input text. The second approach is based on the inductive learning of patterns found in the input text. In contrast to inflexible and expensive hand- coded rules, the pattern based learning algorithm generates specific rules from the training examples and abstracts them to more general ones. The rule language allows to express sophisticated language patterns, appropriate for natural language texts. However, both approaches expect a more uniform language than in fiction or everyday literature. Finally, we will evaluate the approaches based on specific characteristics of the texts and the attributes extracted. This methodology differs from evaluation techniques which compare algorithms on a standard set of text like the seminar announcement corpus.
(joint work with Christian Siefkes and Peter Siniakov)

Speaker: Ion Androutsopoulos

Abstract

We present the source authoring facilities of a natural language generation system that produces personalised descriptions of objects in multiple natural languages starting from language-independent symbolic information in ontologies and databases as well as pieces of canned text. The system has been tested in applications ranging from museum exhibitions to presentations of computer equipment for sale. We discuss the architecture of the overall system, the resources that the authors manipulate, the functionality of the authoring facilities, the system's personalisation mechanisms, and how they relate to source authoring. A usability evaluation of the authoring facilities is also presented, followed by more recent work on reusing information extracted from existing databases and documents, and supporting the owl ontology specification language.

• Summer 2005