MIS Distinguished Speaker Series

Temple University

You are here: Home / Archives for Maryland

Maryland

October 5 – Anand Gopal to Present “A for Effort? Using the Crowd to Identify Moral Hazard in NYC Restaurant Hygiene Inspections”

By

Department of Management Information Systems and Data Science Institute

A for Effort? Using the Crowd to Identify Moral Hazard in NYC Restaurant Hygiene Inspections

by

Anandasivam Gopal

Dean’s Professor of Information Systems

Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland

Friday, October 5, 2018

10:30 AM – noon

Fred Fox Boardroom (Alter 378)

Abstract

From an upset stomach to a life-threatening foodborne illness, getting sick is all too common after eating in restaurants. While health inspection programs are designed to protect consumers, such inspections typically occur at wide intervals of time, allowing restaurant hygiene to remain unmonitored in the interim periods. Information provided in online reviews may be effectively used in these interim periods to gauge restaurant hygiene. In this paper, we provide evidence for how information from online reviews of restaurants can be effectively used to identify cases of hygiene violations in restaurants, even after the restaurant has been inspected and certified. We use data from restaurant hygiene inspections in New York City from the launch of an inspection program from 2010 to 2016, and combine this data with online reviews for the same set of restaurants. Using supervised machine learning techniques, we then create a hygiene dictionary specifically crafted to identify hygiene-related concerns, and use it to identify systematic instances of moral hazard, wherein restaurants with positive hygiene inspection scores are seen to regress in their hygiene maintenance within 90 days of receiving the inspection scores. To the extent that social media provides some visibility into the hygiene practices of restaurants, we argue that the effects of information asymmetry that lead to moral hazard may be partially mitigated in this context. Based on our work, we also provide strategies for how cities and policy-makers may design effective restaurant inspection programs, through a combination of traditional inspections and the appropriate use of social media.

October 27 – Brian Butler to Present “Global is Great…but We Live Here: Understanding the Nature and Implications of Local Information Landscapes”

By

Global is Great…but We Live Here: Understanding the Nature and Implications of Local Information Landscapes

by

Brian Butler

Professor and Senior Associate Dean

College of Information Studies, University of Maryland

 Friday, October 27, 2017

10:30 AM – 12:00 PM

Speakman Hall Suite 200

Abstract

While much has been written over the past several decades about the ability of information and communication technologies to “eliminate distance”, the reality is that most people continue to live and work in geographically bounded communities that they think of as their local environment. Yet, despite the importance of place and space in our lives and organizations, the information systems literature has little or nothing to say about the systems that underlie local communities. There is a slowly growing body of work which considers government and public sector IT infrastructures, but these studies tend to focus on systems that exist within organizations. Work about community information infrastructures moves beyond the organizational “box”, but it has a strong focus on the technological infrastructures that communities create (or fail to create). While useful, these studies typically stop short of examining the information that is actually available through these systems – and as such they provide limited perspectives on the ultimate usefulness and impact of community systems.  Drawing from initial studies of community information landscapes, I will present some early empirical results that suggest that despite popular beliefs that we live in a “networked world”, in many cases finding information about local events, activities, opportunities, and organizations continues to be a challenge.  From this work, the concept of geographically defined gaps in available information (i.e. information deserts) is developed as an alternative conception of digital inequality.

Bio

Brian Butler is Professor and Senior Associate Dean at the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland. Over the past several years, he has provided operational leadership at the UMD iSchool, overseeing a $1 million facilities expansion and leading launch of an undergraduate Information Science program that after 2 years now has more than 400 students. He joined the iSchool in 2012, where he has also been Director of the Master of Information Management (MIM) program, Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of Communities and Information (CASCI), and Interim Dean. His research has focused on developing theories and techniques that enable groups, communities, and organizations to harness the full potential of new technologies. His recent work examined the role of local information institutions and infrastructures in community resilience.  Butler’s research and community-building work have been funded by federal agencies, foundations and corporations that include National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Microsoft Research, Yahoo! and Intel. His work has been published in Organization Science, Information Systems Research, ACM Transactions on Computer Human Interaction, The Journal of Medical Internet Research, and The Journal of the Association of Information Science and Technology. From 1998-2011, Butler held academic appointments in the Katz Graduate School of Business and the Clinical and Translational Science Institute at the University of Pittsburgh. He earned a BS in Mathematics/Computer Science, a MS in Information Systems, and a PhD in Information Systems from Carnegie Mellon University.