Information Systems
Bringing Industry Together Through Collaborations

Vijayan Sugumaran, professor, MIS, collaborates with colleagues in various countries to address international business issues, including:

• Addressing software engineering issues through an eight-year collaboration with Professor Sooyong Park from the Department of Computer Science, Sogang University, South Korea. Together, they are reviewing how to manage the process of producing new versions of software in an industry with varying standards by developing a base architecture that will make it easier for software to evolve.
• Focusing on intelligent agent and multi-agent systems, supply chain management, mass customization and grid computing through an eight-year collaboration with Professor Stefan Kirn of University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart, Germany.
• Improving UML model quality in partnership with Narsi Bolloju of City University in Hong Kong for the last two years.
• A three-year partnership with Epaminondas Kapetanios of University of Westminster in London researching multilingual Web querying and semantic query expansion.
• Using upper ontologies Web querying using ResearchCyc and Ontology Selection with Jordi Canesa of Universitat Oberta de Catalunya in Barcelona.
• Researching areas such as ontology engineering, semantic technologies and semantic search in a recent collaboration with Professor Jon Atle Gulla of Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim.

For more information, contact Sugumaran at (248) 370-2831 or sugumara@oakland.edu.

Health Care Virtual Communities
Balaji Rajagopalan, associate professor, MIS, and graduate research assistant Dean J Przymusinski are developing a framework for identifying the mechanisms by which certain system design features add value to health care virtual communities. The proposed framework draws upon theories in social psychology to identify what behaviors specific design features will likely elicit from health care virtual community participants.  Using this framework, systems developers will be able to leverage valuable insights into which design features will best support a virtual community's objectives and deliver the greatest value to users.

For more information, contact Rajagopalan at (248) 370-4958 or rajagopa@oakland.edu.