Student portfolio

On April 11-13, Temple MIS hosted the 10th Annual Association for Information Systems Student Chapter Leadership Conference. Over 180 students and faculty attendees from 33 schools participated in the conference. AIS student chapter leaders and members convened in Philadelphia to exchange best practices, network with students from other chapters and engage with industry experts on cutting-edge topics. Chapter members also competed in four competition tracks in topics such as analytics, AI and blockchain.

Temple was the founding University for AIS student chapters,” says Jeremy Shafer, Temple AIS student chapter adviser. “The first conference was held at Temple in 2010, and we were excited to bring it back to Temple for the 10th anniversary.”

The conference had a full agenda, with nine workshops and panels organized and led by students in topics such as chapter leadership, women in IT, location analytics and ethical hacking. Industry leaders from AmerisourceBergen, NBCUniversal, Alexion and Capgemini spoke to the student and faculty attendees about cutting-edge information technology topics. The conference also featured two keynotes: George Llado, chief information officer and senior vice president of Alexion, and Douglas Robinson, vice president of AmerisourceBergen.

“Bringing the conference back to Temple allowed us to show what we’ve accomplished as a chapter at a national level,” says Justin Kish, MIS ’19, Temple AIS chapter president. Temple AIS Officers Vice President Cara Evans, MIS ’19, and Director of Professional Development Ami Parekh, MIS ’19,  coordinated a team of over 50 student volunteers, who greeted and guided attendees around campus.

The members of Temple AIS truly showed their dedication to the organization,” says Parekh, “The enthusiasm of our student volunteers made the conference a memorable experience for everyone.”

Matthew Nelson, executive director of AIS and Matti Rossi, past president of AIS, attended the conference. Nelson was impressed with the quality of the conference. “The quality of the competitions, the professionalism of the students and the enthusiasm and networking between students and universities is at the heart of AIS’ mission.”

“The 10th AIS Student Leadership conference demonstrated once again the liveliness of our student chapters and the health of the information systems field. AIS is very grateful for the support of Temple and the Fox School of Business and Department of Management Information Systems for organizing this year’s event,” says Rossi.

Back in 2006, JaeHwuen Jung, assistant professor of Management Information Systems, had something in his back pocket few other people had access to at the time. As an IT application architect at the largest telecom company in South Korea, he had a smartphone with unlimited data.

Almost immediately, he saw the future. “I knew this was going to change the way people shopped, did business, and lived their lives.” It changed his behavior, says Jung. For example, he became a comparison shopper, checking out the items he wanted in a bricks-and-mortar store but making the purchase online, for the lowest price.

After almost seven years in that job, what he saw inspired him to earn a Ph.D. in MIS. Today, he researches the impact of new channels and digital platforms on consumer behavior.

Jung’s paper “Love Unshackled: Identifying the Effect of Mobile App Adoption in Online Dating,” published in MIS Quarterly in March 2019, explores the impact of one such channel—mobile apps—for those in search of romantic partners. His paper shows that accessing dating apps via mobile phone results in users not only increasing their access but also getting better matches than they would have using a desktop version alone.

Why? It all has to do with the way a mobile device affects behavior. “As we rarely share our mobile phone and use it in more private places such as bathroom, it feels more private than a computer,” says Jung. So when people use a dating app on their phones, they are honest, more impulsive, and less inhibited. All these things add up to more time spent using the app and better matches.

Jung’s new research looks at how to optimize the referral program. He’s testing different referral incentive designs and learning surprising things. “If the company rewards the existing customer, there’s some guilt involved because they get something and the friend they are referring doesn’t,” he explains. But if the friend benefits, people are willing to make more referrals, and to closer friends.

In the classroom, Jung teaches data analytics to MIS majors and minors. He shows how businesses can efficiently store and retrieve data as well as how to analyze increasingly complex datasets. “Today, companies can track user locations. They know more about user behavior. With all this data comes marketing opportunities,” he says.

Professor Detmar Straub had eight articles published or accepted for publication over the 2018-2019 academic year. These papers cover a wide range of topics, including health IT, knowledge management, outsourcing and two-sided platforms. This research will appear in the top journals in the discipline, such as MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, the Journal of Management Information Systems and the Journal of the Association of Information Systems.

According to an annual analysis produced by the University of Arizona, Straub has a cumulative h-index of 70, designating him as one of the most productive and most cited researchers in the field of MIS. The h-index is an author-level metric that attempts to measure both the productivity and citation impact of the publications of a scientist or scholar.

A partial list of Straub’s recently published and forthcoming work is below:

• Lee, J., Park, Y., Koo, Y., & Straub, D. (in press). Holistic Archetypes of IT Outsourcing Strategy. MIS Quarterly.
• Jung, D., Kim, B.C., & Straub, D. (in press). Innovation and Policy Support for Digital Two-Sided Market Platforms: Can Government Policymakers and Executives Optimize Both Societal Value and Profits? Information Systems Research.
• Chen, L., Baird, A., & Straub, D. (in press). Fostering Participant Health Knowledge and Attitudes: An Econometric Study of a Chronic Disease-Focused Online Health Community. Journal of Management Information Systems
• Chen, L., Baird, A., & Straub, D. (in press). An Analysis of the Evolving Intellectual Structure of Health Information Systems Research within the Information Systems (IS) Discipline. Journal of the Association of Information Systems.
• Chen, L., Baird, A., & Straub, D. (2019). Why do participants continue to contribute? Evaluation of usefulness voting and commenting motivational affordances within an online knowledge community. Decision Support Systems, 118, 21-32.

The Department of Management Information Systems continues to grow. I am pleased to introduce you to our two newest faculty, Anthony Vance and Aleksi Aaltonen. Dr. Vance’s expertise is in behavioral aspects of cybersecurity, and Dr. Aaltonen’s research focuses on digital innovation. We are excited to have them join our department.

Read about how we prepare our students for future success. Read about Bruce Fadem, Chair of the Fox IT Advisory Board. He discusses his role as founding Chair of the board and how that group of senior IT executives shapes our cutting-edge curriculum and provides guidance for our students.

Earlier this Fall the Institute for Business and Information Technology (IBIT) held its annual IT Career Fair, connecting over 250 student attendees with 40 companies. In November IBIT held the Sixth Annual Temple NBCUniversal Analytics Challenge. It was a great success, with over 350 students across the University competing for $12,000 in prizes.

These opportunities are a big part of what make our students successful. We profile Christian Hettinger (BBA ’18) and Danielle Buerger (BBA ’17), who are applying what they’ve learned in MIS in two very different career paths. We also profile Shahla Raei (’17), graduate of the MS in IT Auditing and Cybersecurity, who is applying what she learned to advance her career as an IT Auditor.

Associate Professor Anthony Vance said the most common cybersecurity mistake people make is password reuse. To minimize the threat of a data breach, every online account password must be unique. All that memorization? Impossible.

“If you try to remember all the passwords in your head, they’ll be weak. You shouldn’t even try,” said Vance, who has used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), eye tracking and electroencephalogram to explore how to create security warnings that won’t be overlooked. “I recommend using a password manager.”

These online services require users to memorize a single strong password – Vance recommends a random string of words – and the software will manage the rest.  

“That reduces the number of passwords from dozens to just one, and that’s feasible,” he said.

Vance is one of two new professors on the faculty of the Management Information Systems Department of Temple University’s Fox School of Business. He will teach a cybersecurity elective for undergraduates while juggling research topics including how to make strong passwords easier for the brain to remember. He also serves as Director of Fox’s Center for Cybersecurity.

“At the beginning of classes, I tell students I want them to develop a sense of ‘professional paranoia,’ ” said Vance, who has Ph.Ds in Information Systems from Georgia State University, the University of Paris-Dauphine and Finland’s University of Oulu. “I want people to know what risks are out there and to make intelligent decisions about them.”

Assistant Professor Aleksi Aaltonen, whose research focuses on data-based innovations and organizing using computational methods, is also new to Fox.  He’s also a successful entrepreneur – He co-founded Moves, an activity tracking app that was purchased by Facebook in 2014.   

“I tell students that doing academic research and being a start-up entrepreneur are very similar because with both you have to cope with lots of uncertainty,” Aaltonen said. “Even if you have a great idea, it takes a lot of work to be successful whether you’re an entrepreneur or a researcher. Both also require accepting that sometimes you’ll fail.”

Aaltonen, whose Ph.D. is from the London School of Economics and Political Science, said technology is changing quickly and it’s critical that users evolve and change with it. He cited Wikipedia as an example.

“How did it learn to manage itself? Where did that come from?” he asked. “We have to remember that it’s completely different from 2001 when it started. The original intentions may not drive it today. How do they change and evolve without becoming stale and falling apart?”

Aaltonen will teach a project-based MIS 4596 course requiring students to develop a tech solution to a problem or an innovative application. It’s the final course for MIS undergraduates,  allowing them to integrate all that they’ve learned.

Aaltonen’s real world entrepreneurship means students will benefit from his experiences. He also discourages being a new technology evangelist.

“We need to teach our students to see through the hype and to pick out the technologies that are relevant for their businesses,” Aaltonen said. “Pay attention to tech but not just for the sake of tech.”

 The 6th Annual NBCUniversal Temple University Analytics Challenge attracted more than 135 entries across six colleges, with the first-place finishers coming from Fox School of Business, Klein College of Media and Communications and the Tyler School of Art.

MIS students Jake Green and Rohit Bobby partnered with Klein’s Sergio Aguilar to win the analysis category. Tyler School of Art student Xi (Cynthia) Cheng was the graphics category winner. The first-place finishers took home $2,500. There were also cash prizes for the second and third place winners and two honorable mentions in each category.

“All of the teams put a lot of work into their challenges,” said MIS Assistant Professor Laurel Miller, who organized the event and serves as Director of the Institute for Business and Information Technology. Miller was also a mentor to the three-member analysis team winners and said she was impressed “by how meticulously they looked at each and every angle.”

Teams could choose from three data sets to answer the following questions: The first, from competition sponsor NBCUniversal, asked how media companies align with esports; the second, from global biopharmaceutical company Alexion, sought to learn who the winners and losers were in healthcare funding and payments; the third, from pharmaceutical distributor AmerisourceBergen, questioned why pharmacies buy drugs from non-primary vendors.

This was the first year a sports-related challenge was offered and many teams were drawn to that. Both first place winners took on the NBCUniversal challenge. Graphics winner Cheng used images from Pac-Man and simple synthesizer sounds to look at the overlap between esports viewers and traditional sports fans in her four-minute video. The analysis trio reworked the question, team member Green said, to ask, “What can media companies and specifically, networks such as those powered by NBC sports group do to adapt to the esports audience and remain a leading delivery and engagement platform for sport entertainment?”

“This project taught me so many lessons that will be of value in my future professional endeavors,” Green said. “It taught us to give more with less. It taught us to condense mountains of data and weeks’ worth of information gathering into a four-minute pitch. We had the privilege of coming together as a team in pursuit of a common goal, despite our differences in educational background.”

Aidan Doyle, Alexion’s Director of Data and Analytic Platforms and a first-time competition judge, said he was impressed by the students and the challenges they tackled.

“When I went to college, you signed up for a class, walked into an amphitheater, the professor wrote on a board, you wrote it down and at the end you’d take a test,” said Doyle. “What I see in the system in the US 30 years later, especially at Temple, is a collaborative effort that brings the best ideas together between all faculty while engaging students and industry… To me, it summed up why Temple and other institutions are the place to be.”