Business Commons^™

Open Source Foundations For Spatial Decision Support Systems, Jochen Albrecht

Publications and Research

Spatial Decision Support Systems (SDSS) were a hot topic in the 1990s, when researchers tried to imbue GIS with additional decision support features. Successful practical developments such as HAZUS or CommunityViz have since been built, based on commercial desktop software and without much heed for theory other than what underlies their process models. Others, like UrbanSim, have been completely overhauled twice but without much external scrutiny. Both the practical and the theoretical foundations of decision support systems have developed considerably over the past 20 years. This article presents an overview of these developments and then looks at what corresponding tools …

The Rise Of Real-Time Retail Payments, Zhiling Guo

MITB Thought Leadership Series

TRANSACTING for just about anything using our mobile phones has become commonplace, and so many consumers will be intrigued to discover that after making a purchase it can still take longer for payment to reach a vendor’s bank account than it does for the purchased goods to be delivered.

Leveraging Artificial Intelligence To Capture The Singapore Rideshare Market, Pradeep Varakantham

MITB Thought Leadership Series

BIKE-SHARING programmes face many of the issues encountered by their counterparts in the carsharing world. But in Singapore, there are a number of factors that have a unique impact on the industry. These include the regulatory structure and the significant fines for those companies who do not abide by these regulations. When this is combined with the competitive nature of the industry in one of the world's most dynamic cities, it becomes clear that first movers who leverage machine learning and prediction will come to dominate the industry

Cross-Border Interbank Payments And Settlements: Emerging Opportunities For Digital Transformation, Yi Meng Lau, Et Al

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The report “Cross-Border Interbank Payments and Settlements” is a cross-jurisdictional industry collaboration between Canada, Singapore and the United Kingdom to examine the existing challenges and frictions that arise when undertaking crossborder payments. This report explores proposals for new and more efficient models for processing cross-border transactions.

Double Learning Or Double Blinding: An Investigation Of Vendor Private Information Acquisition And Consumer Learning Via Online Reviews, Nan Hu, Kevin E. Dow, Alain Yee Loong Chong, Ling Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, building upon information acquisition theory and using portfolio methods and system equations, we made an empirical investigation into how online vendors and consumers are learning from each other, and how online reviews, prices, and sales interact among each other. First, this study shows that vendors acquire information from both private and public channels to learn the quality of their products to make price adjustment. Second, for the more popular products and newly released products, vendors are more motivated to acquire private information that is more precise than the average precision to adjust their price. Third, we document …

Heterogeneous Embedding Propagation For Large-Scale E-Commerce User Alignment, Vincent W. Zheng, Mo Sha, Yuchen Li, Hongxia Yang, Yuan Fang, Zhenjie Zhang, Kian-Lee Tan, Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We study the important problem of user alignment in e-commerce: to predict whether two online user identities that access an e-commerce site from different devices belong to one real-world person. As input, we have a set of user activity logs from Taobao and some labeled user identity linkages. User activity logs can be modeled using a heterogeneous interaction graph (HIG), and subsequently the user alignment task can be formulated as a semi-supervised HIG embedding problem. HIG embedding is challenging for two reasons: its heterogeneous nature and the presence of edge features. To address the challenges, we propose a novel Heterogeneous …

Jobsense: A Data-Driven Career Knowledge Exploration Framework And System, Xavier Jayaraj Siddarth Ashok, Ee-Peng Lim, Philips Kokoh Prasetyo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Today’s job market sees rapid changes due to technology and business model disruptions. To fully tap on one’s potential in career development, one has to acquire job and skill knowledge through working on different jobs. Another approach is to seek consultation with career coaches who are trained to offer career advice in various industry sectors. The above two approaches, nevertheless, suffer from several shortcomings. The on-the-job career development approach is highly inefficient for today’s fast changing job market. The latter career coach assisted approach could help to speed up knowledge acquisition but it relies on expertise of career coaches but …

I4s: Capturing Shopper’S In-Store Interactions, Sougata Sen, Archan Misra, Vigneshwaran Subbaraju, Karan Grover, Meeralakshmi Radhakrishnan, Rajesh K. Balan, Youngki Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we present I4S, a system that identifies item interactions of customers in a retail store through sensor data fusion from smartwatches, smartphones and distributed BLE beacons. To identify these interactions, I4S builds a gesture-triggered pipeline that (a) detects the occurrence of “item picks”, and (b) performs fine-grained localization of such pickup gestures. By analyzing data collected from 31 shoppers visiting a mid-sized stationary store, we show that we can identify person-independent picking gestures with a precision of over 88%, and identify the rack from where the pick occurred with 91%+ precision (for popular racks).

Disruptive Technology: Can The Banking Industry Harness Disruption For Competitive Edge?, Edgar Low

MITB Thought Leadership Series

Disruptive innovation was identified as a phenomenon more than two decades ago by prominent Harvard scholar Clayton Christensen. So you may wonder why established industries are only now waking up to the prospect of digital transformation - the banking industry in particular.

Research Innovation And Institutional Growth: Digital Humanities, Usm, And The University Of Maine System, Janet M. Billson, Katherine Bessey

Research Innovation and Institutional Growth

No abstract provided.

Talent Flow Analytics In Online Professional Network, Richard J. Oentaryo, Ee-Peng Lim, Xavier Jayaraj Siddarth Ashok, Philips Kokoh Prasetyo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Analyzing job hopping behavior is important for understanding job preference and career progression of working individuals. When analyzed at the workforce population level, job hop analysis helps to gain insights of talent flow among different jobs and organizations. Traditionally, surveys are conducted on job seekers and employers to study job hop behavior. Beyond surveys, job hop behavior can also be studied in a highly scalable and timely manner using a data-driven approach in response to fast-changing job landscape. Fortunately, the advent of online professional networks (OPNs) has made it possible to perform a large-scale analysis of talent flow. In this …

Blockchain Based Efficient And Robust Fair Payment For Outsourcing Services In Cloud Computing, Yinghui Zhang, Robert H. Deng, Ximeng Liu, Dong Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As an attractive business model of cloud computing, outsourcing services usually involve online payment and security issues. The mutual distrust between users and outsourcing service providers may severely impede the wide adoption of cloud computing. Nevertheless, most existing payment solutions only consider a specific type of outsourcing service and rely on a trusted third-party to realize fairness. In this paper, in order to realize secure and fair payment of outsourcing services in general without relying on any third-party, trusted or not, we introduce BCPay, a blockchain based fair payment framework for outsourcing services in cloud computing. We first present the …

A Strategic Value Appropriation Path For Cloud Computing, Abhishek Kathuria, Arti Mann, Jiban Khuntia, Robert J. Kauffman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cloud-based information management is one of the leading competitive differentiation strategies for firms. With the increasing criticality of information management in value creation and process support, establishing an integrated capability with cloud computing is vital for organizational success in the changing landscape of business competition. These issues have received scant attention, however. We draw on the resource-based view, dynamic capability hierarchy concepts, and the perspective of operand and operant resources to suggest a cloud value appropriation model for firms. We argue that, to appropriate business value from cloud computing, the firm needs to effectively deploy cloud computing and leverage cloud …

Customer Level Predictive Modeling For Accounts Receivable To Reduce Intervention Actions, Michelle L. F. Cheong, Wen Shi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

One of the main costs associated with Accounts receivable (AR) collection is related to the intervention actions taken to remind customers to pay their outstanding invoices. Apart from the cost, intervention actions may lead to poor customer satisfaction, which is undesirable in a competitive industry. In this paper, we studied the payment behavior of invoices for customers of a logistics company, and used predictive modeling to predict if a customer will pay the outstanding invoices with high probability, in an attempt to reduce intervention actions taken, thus reducing cost and improving customer relationship. We defined a pureness measure to classify …

Trajectory-Driven Influential Billboard Placement, Ping Zhang, Zhifeng Bao, Yuchen Li, Guoliang Li, Yipeng Zhang, Zhiyong Peng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper we propose and study the problem of trajectory-driven influential billboard placement: given a set of billboards U (each with a location and a cost), a database of trajectories T and a budget L, find a set of billboards within the budget to influence the largest number of trajectories. One core challenge is to identify and reduce the overlap of the influence from different billboards to the same trajectories, while keeping the budget constraint into consideration. We show that this problem is NP-hard and present an enumeration based algorithm with (1−1/e) approximation ratio. However, the enumeration should be …

Why Accountants Should Embrace Machine Learning?, Benjamin Huan Zhou Lee, Gary Pan, Poh Sun Seow

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

AI and ML are enabling tools that take the tedious gruntwork out of accounting, freeing up professionals to provide valuable insights - as well as professional scepticism - which are sought-after services no machine can replicate.

Esg And Corporate Financial Performance: Empirical Evidence From China's Listed Power Generation Companies, Changhong Zhao, Yu Guo, Jiahai Yuan, Mengya Wu, Daiyu Li, Yiou Zhou, Jiangang Kang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Nowadays, listed companies around the world are shifting from short-term goals of maximizing profits to long-term sustainable environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals. People have come to realize that ESG has become an important source of the corporate risk and may affect the company's financial performance and profitability. Recent research shows that good ESG performance could improve the financial performance in some countries. Yet, the question of how does ESG affect financial performance has not been thoroughly discussed and studied in China. In this article, we study China's listed power generation groups to explore the relationship between ESG performance and …

Transaction Cost Optimization For Online Portfolio Selection, Bin Li, Jialei Wang, Dingjiang Huang, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To improve existing online portfolio selection strategies in the case of non-zero transaction costs, we propose a novel framework named Transaction Cost Optimization (TCO). The TCO framework incorporates the L1 norm of the difference between two consecutive allocations together with the principles of maximizing expected log return. We further solve the formulation via convex optimization, and obtain two closed-form portfolio update formulas, which follow the same principle as Proportional Portfolio Rebalancing (PPR) in industry. We empirically evaluate the proposed framework using four commonly used data-sets. Although these data-sets do not consider delisted firms and are thus subject to survival bias, …

App-Titude Test: Reviewing Productivity-Boosting And Anxiety-Busting Apps, Nurin Nazifa Binte Mohd Yusoff

Social Space

Self-improvement apps have been on the market for a while, but judging from the general lack of reviews, not many have been put to the test. For this edition ofThe Short List, I downloaded five mobile applicationsclaiming to enhance productivity and lower anxiety levels, and tried them out over the course of a few weeks. Am I now more productive and relaxed? Maybe.But were they app-solutely essential? Read on to find out.

Striving To Earn More: A Survey Of Work Strategies And Tool Use Among Crowd Workers, Toni Kaplan, Susumu Saito, Kotaro Hara, Jeffrey P. Bigham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Earning money is a primary motivation for workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk, but earning a good wage is difficult because work that pays well is not easily identified and can be time-consuming to find. We explored the strategies that both low- and high-earning workers use to find and complete tasks via a survey of 360 workers. Nearly all workers surveyed had earning money as their primary goal, and workers used many of the same tools (browser extensions and scripts) and strategies in an attempt to earn more money, regardless of earning level. However, high-earning workers used more tools, were more …

Modeling Contemporaneous Basket Sequences With Twin Networks For Next-Item Recommendation, Duc Trong Le, Hady W. Lauw, Yuan Fang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Our interactions with an application frequently leave a heterogeneous and contemporaneous trail of actions and adoptions (e.g., clicks, bookmarks, purchases). Given a sequence of a particular type (e.g., purchases)-- referred to as the target sequence, we seek to predict the next item expected to appear beyond this sequence. This task is known as next-item recommendation. We hypothesize two means for improvement. First, within each time step, a user may interact with multiple items (a basket), with potential latent associations among them. Second, predicting the next item in the target sequence may be helped by also learning from another supporting sequence …

A Proposal For A Decentralized Liquidity Savings Mechanism With Side Payments, Adam Fugal, Rodney Garratt, Zhiling Guo, Dave Hudson

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In most countries, the central bank provides the medium to physically settle the smallest payments (cash) and the means to electronically settle the largest payments, which typically are wholesale payments between banks. For the latter purpose the central bank usually operates a system through which banks can settle payments in central bank money. Historically, interbank payments were settled via (end of day) netting systems, but as volumes and values increased central banks became worried about the risks inherent in deferred net settlement systems, so most central banks opted for the implementation of a Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) system. With …

Towards Easy Comparison Of Local Businesses Using Online Reviews, Yong Wang, Hammad Haleem, Conglei Shi, Yanhong Wu, Xun Zhao, Siwei Fu, Huamin Qu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the rapid development of e-commerce, there is an increasing number of online review websites, such as Yelp, to help customers make better purchase decisions. Viewing online reviews, including the rating score and text comments by other customers, and conducting a comparison between different businesses are the key to making an optimal decision. However, due to the massive amount of online reviews, the potential difference of user rating standards, and the significant variance of review time, length, details and quality, it is difficult for customers to achieve a quick and comprehensive comparison. In this paper, we present E-Comp, a carefully-designed …

Optimization Of A Cyclic Express Subway Service, Hai Wang, Jiangang Jin, Jingfeng Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With rapid population growth and increasing demand for urban mobility, metropolitan areas such as Singapore, Tokyo, and Shanghai are increasingly dependent on public transport systems. Various strategies are proposed to improve the service quality and capacity of bus and subway systems. Express trains-i.e., trains that skip certain stations-are commonly used, because they can travel at higher speeds, potentially reduce travel time, and serve more passengers. In this paper, we study cyclic express subway service (CESS), in which express trains provide routine transport service with cyclic (periodic) station-skip patterns that can be used in daily service. We propose an exact Mixed …

On The Fintech Revolution: Interpreting The Forces Of Innovation, Disruption And Transformation In Financial Services, Peter Gomber, Robert J. Kauffman, Chris Parker, Bruce W. Weber

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Firms in the financial services industry have been faced with the dramatic and relatively recentemergence of new technology innovations, and process disruptions. The industry as a whole, and many newfintech start-ups are looking for new pathways to successful business models, the creation of enhanced customerexperience, and new approaches that result in services transformation. Industry and academic observers believethis to be more of a revolution than a set of less impactful changes, with financial services as a whole due formajor improvements in efficiency, in customer centricity and informedness. The long-standing dominance ofleading firms that are not able to figure out how …

The Wider Impact Of A National Cryptocurrency, Dennis Ng, Paul Griffin

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This study looks at the impact of a national cryptocurrency on the payment landscape in the midst of the rise of globalpublic cryptocurrencies and interest from central banks in a possible national cryptocurrency. The impacts are analysed for consumers, merchants, banks,payment providers, international money transfer operators and central banks.The study analyses the pros and cons for each player with an overall impactranking. There is a particular emphasis on central banks as they hold key regulatory oversight for economic and financial matters affecting a country.Whilst finding that there is an overall benefit, there are also significant risks. A sandbox approach is …

A Novel Three-Stage Distance-Based Consensus Ranking Method, Nazila Aghayi, Madjid Tavana

Business Systems and Analytics Faculty Work

In this study, we propose a three-stage weighted sum method for identifying the group ranks of alternatives. In the first stage, a rank matrix, similar to the cross-efficiency matrix, is obtained by computing the individual rank position of each alternative based on importance weights. In the second stage, a secondary goal is defined to limit the vector of weights since the vector of weights obtained in the first stage is not unique. Finally, in the third stage, the group rank position of alternatives is obtained based on a distance of individual rank positions. The third stage determines a consensus solution …

Computer Science Minor Marketing Plan, Shannon Oryniak

Senior Honors Projects

Computer Science is one of the fastest growing industries with the highest job demand. It has allowed us to do things we’d never dream capable, and bring to life creations and projects in every field.

While it may not seem like it, computer science involves a great deal of creativity. There are thousands of different ways to code a program and billions of different uses for them. While not everyone may want to code programs for a living, I do believe having an understanding of computer science can be beneficial for any major or any career. Entrepreneurs can learn to …

Applications Of Varying Leadership Structures For Software Engineering Teams, Elliot Sandfort

Honors Theses

This thesis explores the similarities and differences between applications of managing software engineering teams in Design Studio and the state of the practice. Information about the leadership structure of Design Studio teams was gathered over 3 semesters of Design Studio experiences with two companies: Hudl and TD Ameritrade. Information about leadership concepts in the state of the practice was gathered from experiences and observations with three different companies: Hudl, Garmin, and TD Ameritrade. From these experiences and observations, it can be concluded that the leadership structure of Design Studio is valuable as a student learning experience, and with proper consideration …

Ai: Augmentation, More So Than Automation, Steven M. Miller

Asian Management Insights

The take-up of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled systems in organisations is expanding rapidly. Integrating AI-enabled automation with people into workplace processes and societal systems is a complex and evolving challenge. The articles takes a managerial perspective on how firms can effectively deploy human minds and intelligent machines in the workplace.