Recent News of Funded Research in the Information and Decision Sciences Department

The primary news regarding funded research at the MISRC for Fall 2004 is related to the MISRC's corporate members' support of our new business model. The MISRC receiving funding to conduct two new projects under the leadership of MISRC Director, Rob Kauffman, and Research Project Directors, Associate Professor Mani Subramani, for research on outsourcing and offshoring, and Assistant Professor Fred Riggins, for research on radio frequency identification technology (RFID) in various industry settings. The projects are intended to be "fast turnaround" projects, which will deliver results in the late Spring 2005, after project initiation in Fall 2004.

Carlson Chair, Professor Paul Johnson, during 2004 the work of his research group was supported by two 4-year grants from the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research and one 4-year grant from the National Institute of Health. The two grants from the Agency for Health Policy and Research are in their final year. The grant from NIH is new (awarded in September 2004). The general topic of research covered by the three grants is physician decision making and strategies for reducing the incidence of medical error in the treatment of patients with chronic diseases.

Assistant Professor Gedas Adomavicius, Associate Professor Alok Gupta and Rob Kauffman won a $25,000 grant with joint support from the University of Minnesota 's Digital Technology Center (DTC) and the Dean's Office of the Carlson School of Management for research on intelligent storage technologies. The three participate, with IDSc doctoral student Jesse Bockstedt, in the DTC's Digital Intelligent Storage Consortium (DISC), an industry sponsor group involving firms such as Cisco, Storage Technologies, Engenia and IBM. DISC also involved participants from among the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering faculty and doctoral students.

Fred Riggins and Rob Kauffman also received a DTC small grant of $5,000 to support the August 2004 MISRC Research Symposium on the Digital Divide. The funds were to support bringing in a keynote speaker from the Pew Internet Foundation, and for general support for conference activities. The event was co-sponsored by the University of California at Irvine's Center for Research on Information Systems.

Rob Kauffman and Associate Professor Dave Naumann obtained a $15,000 grant from the Carlson School's Dean's Office to support a portion of the May 2005 Gordon B. Davis Research Symposium. The event will celebrate the extraordinary career of the Information and Decision Science Department's recently-retired Honeywell Chair, Gordon Davis. Gordon is popularly known as "the father of the academic field of Information Systems," and he contributed tremendously to the Department's doctoral program, especially to its graduate who have focused on MIS research.

IDSc Professor Carl Adams and Assistant Professor Weidong Xia received additional funding for their multi-year "CIO Project," which has been focusing on issues of infrastructure flexibility, strategic alignment and governance of the IT organization. The project team includes 5 th year doctoral student, Nick Ball, who is completing thesis research in the context of this project.