Business Commons^™

An Evaluation Of Decision Tree And Survival Analysis Techniques For Business Failure Prediction, Adrian Gepp

Adrian Gepp

Accurate business failure prediction models would be extremely valuable to many industry sectors, particularly in financial investment and lending. The potential value of such models has been recently emphasised by the extremely costly failure of high profile businesses in both Australia and overseas, such as HIH (Australia) and Enron (USA). Consequently, there has been a significant increase in interest in business failure prediction, from both industry and academia. Statistical models attempt to predict the failure or success of a business based on publicly available information about that business (or its industry and the overall economy), such as accounting ratios from …

Using Prospect Theory To Investigate Decision-Making Bias Within An Information Security Context, Neil J. Schroeder

Theses and Dissertations

Information security is an issue that has increased in importance over the past decade. In this time both practitioner and academic circles have researched and developed practices and process to more effectively handle information security. Even with growth in these areas there has been little research conducted into how decision makers actually behave. This is problematic because decision makers in the Department of Defense have been observed exhibiting risk seeking behavior when making information security decisions that seemingly violate accepted norms. There are presently no models in the literature that provide sufficient insight into this phenomenon. This study used Prospect …

The Centrality Of Awareness In The Formation Of User Behavioral Intention Toward Preventive Technologies In The Context Of Voluntary Use, Tamara Dinev, Qing Hu

Qing Hu

Little is known about user behavior toward what we call preventive computer technologies that have become increasingly important in the networked economy and society to secure data and systems from viruses, unauthorized access, disruptions, spyware, and similar harmful technologies. We present the results of a study of user behavior toward preventive technologies based on the frameworks of theory of planned behavior in the context of anti-spyware technologies. We find that the user awareness of the issues and threats from harmful technologies is a strong predictor of user behavioral intention toward the use of preventive technologies. In the presence of awareness, …

Marketing Military Service Benefits Segmentation Based On Generalized And Restricted Exchange, Caroline Fisher, Kimball P. Marshall

Business and Information Technology Faculty Research & Creative Works

Willingness to engage in exchange is based on desired benefits. In typical commercial transactions, restricted exchange benefits dominate. However, public policy, social marketing situations might require consideration of both restricted and generalized exchange benefits. Applying factor analysis, cluster analysis and cross-tabulation, this paper reports research that has successfully segmented a young adult target market regarding interest in military service based on considerations of generalized and restricted exchange motivations. This research contributes to a growing body of literature on generalized exchange as a key conceptual element for social marketing. Results demonstrate the utility of the generalized exchange concept in identifying amarket …

Towards Semantic Service Request Of Web Service Composition, Qianhui Althea Liang, Jen-Yao Chung, Steven M. Miller

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

When meeting the challenges in automatic and semi-automatic Web service composition, capturing the user's service demand and preferences is as important as knowing what the services can do. This paper discusses the idea of semantic service requests for composite services, and presents a way to model the elements of a composite service request as user preferences and constraints. The model is based on an interactive and iterative strategy meant to obtain the exact requirements from potential service consumers. The markup vocabularies and associated inference mechanism of OWL-S are used as a means to bring semantics to service requests. Language constructs …

Personality And Programming, Amy B. Woszczynski, Tracy C. Guthrie, Sherri Shade

Faculty and Research Publications

Information systems students continue to struggle to successfully complete computer programming classes. Learning how to program is difficult, and failure and attrition rates in college level programming classes remain at an unacceptably high rate. Since many IS students take a programming course as part of their program of study, IS educators should better understand why IS students tend to achieve low success rates in programming courses and what can be done to improve success rates. Little research to date has addressed potential reasons for student failure in programming principles courses. Many educators simply assume that high failure rates are acceptable …

Managerial Assessments Of E-Business Investment Opportunities: A Field Study, Anandhi S. Bharadwaj, Amrit Tiwana

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Managers charged with assessing investment opportunities for information technologies such as e-business projects face considerable uncertainty in their decision-making processes. Contemporary theories of the firm and the normative prescriptions thereof emphasize the potential for such investments to augment firm-level knowledge and relational capabilities. However, prior research has not examined the relative emphases that managers place on the knowledge and relational capability-augmenting characteristics of the e-business investments. In this paper, we develop a model to assess whether managerial evaluations of e-business investment opportunities are consistent with these normative and theoretical prescriptions. A test of the model using survey data on 485 …

Supporting Individual Time Management Through The Capture And Display Of Temporal Structures, Dezhi Wu

Dissertations

This thesis work examines the time management strategies of individuals in an academic institution and gathers information on the complex temporal structures they experience and manage. Its focus is on understanding the relationship between the quality of individual time management and an individual's understanding and use of temporal structures. This work consists of an exploratory field study to gather data on how people use temporal structures with electronic tools. It is followed by a survey that is given to a larger group of respondents in the same subject population examined with the field study. The survey examines the hypotheses developed …

Electronic Capture And Analysis Of Fraudulent Behavioral Patterns : An Application To Identity Fraud, Benjamin Ngugi

Dissertations

The objective of this research was to find a transparent and secure solution for mitigating identity fraud and to find the critical factors that determine the solution's acceptance. Identity fraud is identified as a key problem with total losses exceeding fifty two billion dollars (Javelin Strategy and Research 2005). A common denominator in most identity-fraud-prone transactions is the use of a keypad; hence this research focuses on keypad data entry and proposes a biometric solution. Three studies develop, evaluate and investigate the feasibility of this solution.

The first study was done in three stages. Stage one investigated the technical feasibility …

Implementation And Analysis Of Cmmi's Configuration Management Process Area; Applicable To "Defined" Level - 3, Ahmad Luqman

International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies

Enterprise Resource Planner (ERP) is a strategically important tool as integrated business application for long-term success in an increasingly competitive global market. This system requires the integration of data and business processes across the whole enterprise. In order to develop a good quality product there is a need of applying proper model. It becomes more costly in terms of training, appraisals, and improvement activities while applying multiple models that are not integrated within and across an organization. Where as Capability Maturity Model Integration is a set of integrated models that successfully addresses multiple disciplines and has integrated training support. Objective …

Opems: Online Peer-To-Peer Expertise Matching System, Sharifullah Khan, S.M. Nabeel

International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies

Internet is a vital source to disseminate and share information to the masses. This has made information available in abundance on the Web. However, finding relevant information is difficult if not impossible. This difficulty is bilateral between information providers and seekers in terms of information presentation and accessibility respectively. This paper proposed an online Peer-to-Peer Expertise Matching system. The approach provides a highly scalable and self-organizing system and helps individuals in presenting and accessing the information in a consistent format on the Web. This makes the sharing of information among the autonomous organizations successful.

Fuzzy Logic Control Of Coupled Liquid Tank System, Muhammad Abid

International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies

This paper presents a fuzzy control of coupled liquid tank system. The Coupled Liquid Tank system is developed at PIEAS. It has three liquid tanks coupled together. The liquid level in tank 2 is maintained using fuzzy logic. The results are compared with the PID control, mostly used in industries.

Using Software Engineering Principles To Develop Reusable Business Rules, Saqib Ali, Ben Soh, Torab Torabi

International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies

Nowadays, businesses need a system that can provide flexibility, reusability and simplicity for their business solutions. However, if business logics or rules are implemented using procedural paradigms, then the business systems will become more complex. In this paper we treat business logics separate from system logics, whereby we analyse a business by describing its rules and developing a set of rule statements. These business rules will be treated as a separate component in the design and implementation of the system. We have found that our proposed method leads to a system, which is more customisable, flexible, efficient, and reusable, in …

Poster Session A: Use Of Neural Networks In Multi-Sensor Fusion For Remote Sensing Applications, Engr. S. M. Haider Aejaz

International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies

Remote sensing encounters different types of objects with similar spectral signatures. Multi-sensors form the solution of the problem with spectral different parts of the spectrum and the resulting information is then processed using digital signal processing techniques. Artificial neural networks provide another method for processing this information. The research describes how neural networks may be used to classify objects on the basis of their spectral response to different frequencies.

Real Time Object Tracking Using Bma, Zeeshan Hameed Khan, Muhammad Aurangzeb

International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies

This paper describes real time object tracking using block matching algorithm (BMA). Emphasis is made on the development of techniques for tracking a user-selected object through digital image sequences in multimedia systems. The ability to track objects in sequences is useful in situations where the motion of objects is important. It is also useful when a moving object is difficult to see and needs to be highlighted. A tracking tool is also of benefit to the developers of a multimedia system to automatically 'mark up' a moving object so a user of the system can select it and manipulate it.

Exploring The Possibility Of Implementing Telecommuting At University Utara Malaysia (Uum), Dr. Wan Rozaini Sheik Osman, Haitham Rashdan

International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies

Global technology has quickly progressed to provide more accessible business modes of communication. The image of the traditional workplace as a particular place to go to work is being replaced with employees working wherever they can be most efficient and productive, whether at home, on a plane, on the road, or a telework center. The availability of affordable technology has been one of the major contributors to the "any time, any place" telecommuting trend. The purpose of this study is to investigate the possibility of the implementation of teleworking at University Utara Malaysia (UUM), the suitable job selection criteria, the …

Evaluation Of Time-Varying Availability In Multi-Echelon Inventory System With Combat Damage, Hoong Chuin Lau, Huawei Song

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The models for multi-echelon inventory systems in existing literatures predominantly address failures due to reliability in peacetime. In wartime or even peacetime operational scenarios, unexpected combat damage can cause a large number of systems to be heavily damaged, to the extent that they become irreparable. In this paper, we study a multi-echelon spare parts support system under combat damage, discuss the replenishment policy and propose an approximate method to evaluate the time-varying system performance operational availability considering the effect of passivation. Experiments show our model works well and efficiently against simulation.

Strategic Assessment Of Information Security Maturity, Arcot Desai Narasimhalu, Dayasindhu Nagarajan, Raghavan Subramanian

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

CXOs are becoming increasingly interested in the information security maturity of their enterprises. This paper presents a CXO dashboard that will allow better management of the information security resources in an enterprise.

Exploiting Belief Bounds: Practical Pomdps For Personal Assistant Agents, Pradeep Varakantham, Rajiv Maheswaran, Milind Tambe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Agents or agent teams deployed to assist humans often face the challenges of monitoring the state of key processes in their environment (including the state of their human users themselves) and making periodic decisions based on such monitoring. POMDPs appear well suited to enable agents to address these challenges, given the uncertain environment and cost of actions, but optimal policy generation for POMDPs is computationally expensive. This paper introduces three key techniques to speedup POMDP policy generation that exploit the notion of progress or dynamics in personal assistant domains. Policy computation is restricted to the belief space polytope that remains …

How Much You Watch, How Much You Pay, Yongdong Wu, Hwee Hwa Pang, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents a pay-video scheme that manages video stream, key stream and payment stream efficiently. In our scheme, the owner segments a video into fragments and encrypts them with independent keys. The keys are generated with a novel concept called as hash interval, where each hash interval discloses a range of numbers without disclosing any information on numbers outside of the range. The video fragments are then broadcast on one or more channels. A buyer can purchase the keys to decrypt any fragments and, within each fragment, any desired quality level. The accompanying payment protocol is integrated with the …

Testing First: Emphasizing Testing In Early Programming Courses, Will Marrero, Amber Settle

Amber Settle

Perceived Impacts Of Government Regulations On Technolgoy Transfers, Caroline Fisher, Jing Li, Marina Onken

Business and Information Technology Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper examines the effects of government regulation on the technology transfer process. Technology transfer is an important component of an economic development effort in communities, states, and nations. Understanding the process used to transfer technology is needed to promote policies that develop an effective infrastructure to encourage technology transfer. This paper uses qualitative and quantitative methodologies to examine managerial perceptions of the effects of government policies on the technology transfer process. The impacts of tax policies, environmental regulations, health and safety regulations, labor regulations, international trade regulations, and the differences in regulations between countries are studied. Items used to …

The Effects Of Digital Audio On Social Presence, Motivation And Perceived Learning In Asynchronous Learning Networks, Eunhee Kim

Dissertations

This study explores the possibilities of applying digital audio to the ALN environment, so that students can speak and listen rather than type and read. Two sets of 1x2 field experiments (text vs. digital audio) were conducted with two formats of digital audio -recorded voice messages and narrated Microsoft PowerPoint presentation - used in several NJIT courses conducted via ALN. The perceptions of communication media were measured from two different user perspectives: active use when the subjects created their assignments using prescribed communication media (audio or text) and passive use when the subjects viewed/listened to other students' work.

The perceptions …

Collaborative Examinations In Asyncronous Learning Networks : Field Experiments On Collaborative Learning Through Online Assessments, Jia Shen

Dissertations

With the proliferation of computer networks and the emergence of virtual teams, learning and knowledge sharing in the online environment has become an increasingly important topic. Applying constructivism and collaborative learning theories to assessment, the collaborative online exam is designed featuring students' active participation in various phases of the exam process through small group activities online. A participatory online exam process is designed featuring similar procedures except that students' involvement in each phase of the exam is individual. The collaborative online exam and the participatory online exam are investigated regarding student exam study strategies, group process, exam outcomes, faculty satisfaction, …

Improving Document Representation By Accumulating Relevance Feedback : The Relevance Feedback Accumulation (Rfa) Algorithm, Razvan Stefan Bot

Dissertations

Document representation (indexing) techniques are dominated by variants of the term-frequency analysis approach, based on the assumption that the more occurrences a term has throughout a document the more important the term is in that document. Inherent drawbacks associated with this approach include: poor index quality, high document representation size and the word mismatch problem. To tackle these drawbacks, a document representation improvement method called the Relevance Feedback Accumulation (RFA) algorithm is presented. The algorithm provides a mechanism to continuously accumulate relevance assessments over time and across users. It also provides a document representation modification function, or document representation learning …

Sharing The Big Apple : A Survey Study Of People, Place And Locatability, Samer Nadim Karam

Theses

Over the past half century social trends and new technologies have weakened local social ties and thus, the fabric of civil society itself. Mobile location-aware community systems offer one path to redress these problems by enhancing community cohesion and the formation of social capital by helping people to meet each other and coordinate their actions. However, little is known about the general population's desire and attitude towards these systems.

The design space described by the People-to-People-to-Geographical-Places Framework (P3-Framework), was used to guide a survey study of the impact of 'place' on people's social information needs and their willingness to share …

Retesting A Model Of The Deming Management Method, Jesse Barfield, Caroline Fisher, Jing Li, Rajiv Mehta

Business and Information Technology Faculty Research & Creative Works

Anderson et al. (1994) developed a model of the theory of quality management underlying the Deming management method; Anderson et al. (1995) tested that model using path analysis. They used data from an existing database collected from 41 manufacturing plants in the electronics, machinery, and transportation industries with 100 or more employees. In this study, which retests their model, data were gathered from over 100 manufacturing and service companies of all sizes across the US and Canada. The measures used in the original study were modified to apply to both service and manufacturing organizations. The data were analysed using similar …

Leveraging Global Resources: A Distributed Process Maturity Framework For Software Product Development, Narayan Ramasubbu, M. S. Krishnan, Prasad Kompalli

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Distributed software development is pervasive in the software industry today as companies vie to leverage global resources. However, popular quality and process frameworks don?t specifically address the key processes needed for managing distributed software development. This practitioner-oriented, evolutionary process maturity framework for globally distributed software development features 24 new key process areas essential for managing distributed software product development and for continuously improving product management capabilities. An assessment survey helps practitioners implement the framework. In this article, the authors detail the framework and assessment survey, as well as report their experiences implementing the framework at a leading global firm. The …

Walverine: A Walrasian Trading Agent, Shih-Fen Cheng, Evan Leung, Kevin M. Lochner, Kevin O'Malley, Daniel M. Reeves, Julian L. Schvartzman, Michael P. Wellman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

TAC-02 was the third in a series of Trading Agent Competition events fostering research in automating trading strategies by showcasing alternate approaches in an open-invitation market game. TAC presents a challenging travel-shopping scenario where agents must satisfy client preferences for complementary and substitutable goods by interacting through a variety of market types. Michigan's entry, Walverine, bases its decisions on a competitive (Walrasian) analysis of the TAC travel economy. Using this Walrasian model, we construct a decision-theoretic formulation of the optimal bidding problem, which Walverine solves in each round of bidding for each good. Walverine's optimal bidding approach, as well as …

Information Technology (It) Appropriateness: The Contingency Theory Of “Fit” And It Implementation In Small And Medium Enterprises, Deepak Khazanchi

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Publications

There is little doubt that advanced information and communication technologies (IT) arc changing the way businesses operate and conduct commerce. As the advent of a more secure Internet and new transmission standards makes it easier and cheaper for businesses to conduct inter-organizational commerce, it is incumbent upon SME managers to assess whether implementing new technologies such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) over the Internet, XML or web-based e-commerce is the "right thing to do" for their organizations. The key question implicit in this decision is addressed in this paper: "Under what conditions should businesses consider themselves likely candidates for (new) …