Gedas Adomavicius Appointed As Digital Technology Center Assistant Professor

Minneapolis, MN

Gedas Adomavicius, a faculty member in the Information and Decision Sciences Department, was appointed as the Digital Technology Center Assistant Professor during February 2005. Gedas has a doctorate from the Courant Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science, from New York University. He also conducted joint research with Professor Alex Tuzhilin at the Stern School of Business. The emphasis of his research to date has been technology-based personalization and customization, recommender systems, and data mining. His work has been published in well known journals in the field, including ACM Transactions on Information Systems, IEEE Knowledge and Data Engineering, Communications of the ACM, and
INFORMS Journal of Computing. Gedas is a top-rated teacher in the Carlson School of Management's Undergraduate IS Concentration, where he recently served as coordinator.

Gedas' appointment as the DTC Assistant Professor reflects his ongoing commitment to a joint research project on "intelligent data storage" that is being conducted in cooperation with faculty and doctoral students from the Computer Science Department in the University of Minnesota's Institute of Technology and the Information and Decision Sciences Department in the Carlson School of Management. The "Digital Intelligent Storage Consortium" (DISC) is a funded project involving a number of well known firms, including Engenio Information Technologies, StorageTek, Veritas, ETRA, Sun Microsystems, Cisco, Intel and Los Alamos National Laboratories. DISC is a technology-focused consortium that consists of an interdisciplinary group of research scientists, engineers and students. The mission is to understand, develop and promote intelligent storage systems.

These systems are intended to provide the users with simpler management, increased functionality and capability, and better performance that lead to a lower overall total cost of ownership. They are also intended to provide storage vendors with opportunities for increased product differentiation.

Gedas' most recent working paper (co-authored with Jesse Bockstedt, Alok Gupta and Rob Kauffman) is entitled "Technology Roles in an Ecosystem Model of Technology Evolution." The paper proposes a new conceptual model for understanding technological evolution that highlights dynamic and highly interdependent relationships between multiple technologies. The authors propose that, when discussing technology evolution, a single technology shouldn't be considered in isolation.

Instead, the authors view technology evolution as a dynamic system that includes the many interrelated technologies. The research work is built on theories from technological forecasting, technology evolution, and innovation research to develop the concept of a technology ecosystem. By considering the interdependent nature of technology evolution, the authors specify three roles technologies play within a technology ecosystem. These roles are identified as components, products and applications, and support and infrastructure. Technologies within an ecosystem interact through these roles and thus impact technological evolution. The authors also classify types of interactions between technology roles, which we term paths of influence. The model provides insights for technology development and forecasting, which is demonstrated through a business mini-case on the digital music industry. This paper was released in the MISRC Working Paper series in early March 2005.

The faculty and staff of the MISRC and the IDSc Department congratulate Gedas on his appointment as the Digital Technology Center Assistant Professor.