In Brief

Critonians on the move…

Newly minted PhD's

Fei Ren will be an assistant professor of IS at the Guanghua School of Management, Peking University, China, starting September 1st, 2007. Fei Ren’s advisor was Sanjeev Dewan and she started her Ph.D. study here in September of 2001. Her dissertation is titled Toward a Comprehensive Understanding of the Risk and Return Underlying the Business Value of Information Technology.

Shutao Dong will be teaching at the Business School of Renmin University, Beijing, China. His advisors were Kevin Zhu and Ken Kraemer and he started his Ph.D. study here in September, 2001. His dissertation is titled Value creation from customer relationship management systems: resources, productivity and profitability effects, and IT governance.

Pei-Fang Hsu will be teaching at the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. Her advisor was Ken Kraemer and she started her Ph.D. study here in September 2001. Her dissertation is titled E-Business and ERP: from Determinants, to Integration, to Value Realization.

Young Bong Chang will teaching at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. His advisor was Vijay Gurbaxani and he started his Ph.D. study here in September 2001. His dissertation is titled Three Essays on the Impact of Information Technology on Firm Productivity and Efficiency.

Congratulations to Kelly Garrett! It is with mixed emotion that we will be bidding Kelly farewell. He has been with CRITO for two years, and during his time here he collaborated on the design of a few surveys and coauthored five papers. Kelly had the opportunity to work on Project POINT and to be a part of several vibrant intellectual communities here on campus, including CRITO, Informatics, and COR.

Kelly will be an assistant professor in the School of Communication at the Ohio State University. It's a great program and he’s very excited to be joining faculty, although he will certainly miss UC Irvine. Kelly and his family will be moving to Upper Arlington (neighboring Columbus) in late July, but will continue to work on the POINT project until the end of August. If you have the chance, stop by the office and wish him well.

Gloria Mark and Martha Feldman received an award from NSF, Human Centered Computing, titled Collaboration Resilience: Restoring Human Infrastructure with Technology. Their innovative research will provide a comprehensive and integrated view of the role of technology in repairing human infrastructure when the environment is disrupted. They expect the study will help define human infrastructure as a research topic and will help shape the agenda on the role of human infrastructure in large-scale technological infrastructure developments. They hope their results will help organizations develop effective plans for restoring the human infrastructure for collaborative work.

Alfred Kobsa served on the program committees of the 22nd Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Vancouver, BC), the IEEE InfoVis 2007 Conference (Sacramento, CA), the 2007 Intelligent User Interfaces Conference (Honolulu, HI), and the 11th International Conference on User Modeling (Corfu, Greece).

Walt Scacchi served as General Chair of the Third IFIP International Open Source Systems Conference in Limerick, IE during 11-14 June 2007. The conference consisted of research papers presentations, workshops, tutorials, panels, and project demonstrations. Over the past decade, the Open Source Software (OSS) phenomenon has had a global impact on the way organizations and individuals create, distribute, acquire and use software and software-based services. Details for the conference can be found at http://oss2007.dti.unimi.it/

Walt Scacchi and Robert Nideffer will be managing a joint venture with Korean researchers that will advance information sharing and digital gaming technology. They want to help expand domestic and international markets for computer games that incorporate new technology to facilitate cross-cultural game development and play. Through UC Irvine’s CalIT2 Computer Game Culture and Technology Laboratory, they are embarking on a new partnership with Korean Researchers. It will be a three-year, $1.35 million collaboration with the Center for Digital Industry Promotion (DIP) in Daegu City, Korea. The researchers will work hand-in-hand with their Korean counterparts over a high-speed digital network. For more information about the project, please see http://www.calit2.net/newsroom/release.php?id=1079.

Imran Currim received the Excellence in Teaching Award, Fully Employed MBA (FEMBA) class of 2007. He has received 14 Excellence in Teaching Awards most of which are for his teaching in the Executive MBA Programs at UCI, New York University, and UCLA. Congratulations Imran!

The Personal Computing Industry Center (PCIC) at UCI’s Paul Merage School of Business, which is one of 22 Industry Centers currently supported by the Sloan Foundation, received its renewal this spring. Ken Kraemer and Jason Dedrick are co-directors of PCIC, which conducts basic and applied research for understanding industry trends, analyzing emerging markets and technologies, and providing insights about new developments.

The recent National Academy of Science report by Ken Kraemer and Jason Dedrick titled Globalization of Innovation: The Personal Computing Industry was featured in the Business section of Internetnews.com on June 14, 2007. The article is called Is Economics Driving PC “Innovation” Offshore?