I am offering several opportunities of independent studies for doctoral and master students in each academic semester. These independent studies, including theoretical, behavioral, or technical aspects, will enable you to not only get exposed to an interesting research topic, but also understand how to conduct a research using appropriate methodologies and get it published eventually in premier conference proceedings and journals. For each potential independent study, you can choose to focus on conceptual, behavioral, or technical aspects.

1) Information Personalization: Personalized online syndication services
Recently, online content syndication or topic tracking service ─ an online service that delivers personalized or user requested content to their personal online accounts or personal digital assistants ─ are becoming increasingly popular. Major online portals, such as AOL, MSN, Yahoo, and CNN, all offer such a type of service based on direct user interest solicitation. Some of the online portals go even further to allow users to keep track on certain topics, like CNN news tracking and Yahoo news tracking. Such online syndication services are enabled based on user models or profiles, which keep the information about users’ interest.

Research questions: How does an online information service provider effectively capture and update users’ information interest, so that it can automatically deliver relevant information to individual users?

2) Web-based learning / mobile learning
Web-based learning (also called e-learning or online learning) has been well recognized as a promising alternative solution to real-time and lifelong learning. Many research studies have shown that Web-based learning can be as effective as traditional classroom learning. However, due to lack of immediate feedback and social community, as well as potential discomfort with e-learning technologies, Web-based learning and teaching has not reached its full potential yet. There are a number of issues that are worthwhile to be further investigated in order to improve Web-based learning effectiveness. For example:

• What are the factors that may affect online learning effectiveness?
• How to enable knowledge sharing and reuse by incorporating ontology and Semantic Web?
• Mobile learning – extending learning to mobile devices
• Web tutoring: how to provide customized content and personal learning guidance dynamically to individual learners?

3) Adaptation and usability in mobile environments
In recent years, computing is moving toward pervasive, ubiquitous environments, in which a variety of devices, software agents, and services are expected to seamlessly integrate and cooperate with each other to deliver appropriate content and services of users’ interest without time and location constraints. The unique features of wireless network and mobile devices, however, present a number of critical challenges for taking advantage of the convenience of mobile devices and enabling Web access. For example, small screen size and limited memory of mobile devices pose challenges on presenting Web pages effectively, while low-bandwidth wireless networks force information systems to adapt content to the dynamically changing network environment.

Research questions: e.g., What are the factors that can be used for content adaptation in a wireless environment? How to present content on mobile devices more effectively? How to conduct usability studies for mobile applications?

4) Cross-cultural effect on computer-mediated communication or group decision-making

With the increasing globalization of world economy and intensive competition, the role of groups and teams in organizations and businesses entails greater significance. The current business environment is characterized by the use of teams working in distributed environments to cope with uncertainty, change, ambiguous problem definitions, and rapidly changing information. Decisions in organizations are more often made by groups of employees, who may have diverse cultural background. Consequently, culture diversity becomes a growing phenomenon in American business and organizations. This situation gets further complicated when group tasks involve cross-cultural project teams whose members may perceive group meetings differently from the traditional North American concepts of group behavior. Many management and organization practices developed in western countries have failed when introduced to other cultures. Such a phenomenon is a major force driving scholars and practitioners to question the universal applicability of existing theories and practices in group support systems research.

Research question: (e.g.,) what is the potential impact of culture on the effectiveness of CMC or group decision making?

5) Web mining or text mining

This independent study will include a comprehensive review of the research on either Web mining in general or text mining. Particularly, you can focus on one or two application areas such as:

- Event detection and surveillance

- Web-based intelligence monitoring and analysis

- Deception detection

- Intrusion detection and information awareness

- Cyber crime detection and analysis

- Bio-terrorism tracking, alerting, and analysis

- Failure analysis and failure identification

I am also open to other research topics in the information system field as well, including information retrieval and extraction, Web services, and e-Commerce. If you are interested in any of the above topics or want to discuss other potential ideas, feel free to contact me at zhangd@umbc.edu or 410 455 2851.