Archive for the 'discoveries' Category

Focus of Academia: a set of problems

Recently I was in New York for the BPM 2010, and Human Potential conferences and I took the opportunity to visit from friends at Columbia University.

While there, in Hamilton Hall, I saw a well written paragraph on the importance of problems and question in academia. Click the thumbnail to see a larger image.

It reads:

The focus of Academia can be defined as not so much a set of topics but as a set of problems. Physicists, economists, historians, and so on have problems that are specific to their fields, and are collectively working on points of intersection in order to solve these problems. Consequently, in every peice of academic writing ther is some problem, some issue, some motivating question that is being explored.. at the heart of every piece of academic writing is academic inquiry.

I was surprised to find this randomly, in the only room at Columbia which I visited. I like it, and though it worth sharing.  I think it highlights the importance of publication as a conversation as Anne Huff’s book points out. Also, the importance of asking great and exciting questions. While at BPM 2010, I met Vasant Dhar from NYU who talked about what issues or questions are at the heart of education and research in the information systems field. They serve as a useful guide for those wondering what IS is, and a starting point for further questions. From Vasant’s paper:

Business Centric Questions

  • How does IT transform industries and change the boundaries between them?
  • How do platforms alter existing business models and create new ones?
  • What determines success with a firm’s IT investments?
  • How do firms effectively get value from and govern data?
  • Why do incumbent companies frequently miss large, new IT-based opportunities?

Technology-Centric Questions

  • How do unique characteristics of digital goods impact business models?
  • Why do network effects pervade IT-based businesses and how do they alter strategy?
  • How does human behavior/interaction differ in spaces mediated by Information Technology?

Dhar, V., & Sundararajan, A. (2007). Issues and Opinions–Information Technologies in Business: A Blueprint for Education and Research. Information Systems Research, 18(2), 125.

Virtual Computing Labs for students through Amazon Web Services

I have seen some excitement about Virtual Computing Labs for students. This allows students to access software and resources from their home that normally would only be available to them from an on campus computer lab. A need for mobile educational resources, and dropping technology costs are driving the introduction of virtual computing lab environments.

Virtual Computing Labs also solve an age-old problem for students and professors alike. Student’s laptops have various flavors of (often unkempt) operating systems on them, they often encounter snags when installing larger pieces of software (e.g. ones that need SQLServer or IIS to run). By having access to a virtual computer these problems can be avoided.

Traditionally VCL environments are made possible by server arrays in data centers in a university data center. Today such technology is only available to a few faculty within a very small percentage of universities. Amazon Web Services allow students to remotely connect to machines (Windows 2008 in my case), regardless of their host OS, where they can install any software they wish. Best of all, they are only charged for how long they use the machine.

In December 2009 Amazon announced it is possible to stop and start servers, thereby not loosing any of your data that prior to that would have been lost on terminating the server. In February 2010 Amazon announced consolidated billing, which it would make it easy for a professor to foot the bill for the students. Just hope that the student’s do not forget to “stop” their instances. In April 2009 Amazon announced AWS in Education grants — which give instructors $100 in AWS credits (to give to each student).

How much does this cost?

Well if you get the $100 Education Grant from Amazon… nothing.

If the students use the instance of the machine for an average of 5 hours each week over the course of a 16 week semester the cost would be: 5 hours X 16 weeks = 80 hours @ 12.5 cents an hour = 10$. In addition, the students would need to pay for the persistent storage of their data. This would be 10 cents per gigabyte per month: 30 gigabytes x 10 cents per month = $3 per month or $12 for the semester. This is easily within the $100 education credit from Amazon. And this also assumes that the students “stop” their instance when they are done using it.

I don’t work for Amazon, but I think this service can solve many potential headaches for professors and students alike at almost no cost. It’s also fun… Students get to setup their own servers in the cloud, and who wouldn’t be excited to do that?

If you want to try it out, follow all the directions at EC2 for Poets! And if you have any problems, leave a comment here…

Tips for Grad School

colleague forwarded me a nice blog post by an MIT PhD student on grad school advice.

It is a great list… except exercise is missing from it, as well as timeboxing.

zotero 1.5beta released today

zotero_logo1Managing citations well can save you loads of time. I do this with Zotero. It is free for everyone, open source, and always getting better. It has a great community of users including one who created a very useful python script to rename PDF files.

A new version came out today, which allows you to backup your precious database to their servers for free, and follow other researchers (akin to twitter). If you want to see my library, request to follow me. In the mean time, check out the main developers library.

One of my favorite things about zotero is that is standards compliant. It makes use of the COinS standard. More on this later. Good descriptions on what else is new, here and here.

What citation manager do you use? Use Zotero? Give a shout out…

Gmail goes offline

gmailInstead of having multiple email accounts, I have everything forwarded to gmail where I have it rigorously sorted through hundereds of filters and labels. I am currently using 5432 MB or 74% of my alloted space. 

I must have been snoozing because offline gmail came out a few weeks ago and I missed it. This should be extremely useful. There has even been a new release already.

Many people are unaware that you can add dots to your gmail adddress. Instead of putting tim@gmail.com I could put t.im@gmail.com, and it would still get to me. I can give online stores my t.im@gmail address, and then filter out those messages if I wish.

Requirements Engineering Design Model

Designing software and websites is not at all like designing a building or city planning. This model is quite useful to help understand the process. I found this preparing for class.

Requirements Engineering Design Model

Requirements Engineering Design Model

Here is a summary of the model from the article:

Summary: Requirements engineering is an iterative exercise; often, the purpose of going through the exercise is to define the problem itself, and in the process, refine requirements. That is, an initially fuzzy requirement gets clarified through discussion, leading to other, more specific requirements. While the model has been motivated by requirements engineering, its components are generic enough to be applicable across various phases of the life cycle.

The model is from Ramesh and Dhar 1992
, based on the IBIS model by Kunz and Rittel. References below.

Kunz, W., & Rittel, H. W. J. (1970). Issues as Elements of Information Systems. Institute of Urban & Regional Development, University of California.

Ramesh, B., & Dhar, V. (1992). Supporting systems development by capturing deliberations during requirements engineering. Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on, 18(6), 498-510. doi: 10.1109/32.142872.

Three Paper Dissertation Format

The time is soon approaching when I will be writing and defending a dissertation proposal. I have usually liked the idea writing three smaller papers rather than one large monography of comparable size. Today I found a great comment on the AOM OCIS Student Blog which describes some great benefits of the three paper format.