Research Interests

Generally, I am interested in information technologies and systems for human-centered information processing activities (transactional or analytical, at individual, group and organizational levels). More specifically, I have the following related interests:

  1. Web information systems and development: various types of web-based information systems and applications for organizations, businesses and communities.
    • Information architecture and information seeking: information architecture studies how information/content are organized in a way to best serve human's need. It at least includes structural design, categorization/labeling, user interaction and interface design, system usability, and human information seeking (navigation and search) behaviors.
    • Web (site) engineering: methodologies, techniques and technologies for web site planning, development, management and evolvement. A web site here means a comprehensive and coherent system of information/content, applications and services based on the web to serve a large group of people.
    • Web-based information system architecture: the structure and architecture of web based information systems/sites: including various web application frameworks, portal framework, service oriented architecture, integration, etc.
  2. Business intelligence and decision support
    • Visual information exploration/mining, information visualization: this focuses on the decision support using a human-centered visual exploration approach. The visual exploration process is an interactive exploration process between humans and computer created visualizations. This type of method emphasizes on the human's role in problem comprehension and decision making.
    • Knowledge management system: systems that facilitate the recording, sharing and use of various forms of human knowledge.
  3. Information security: focusing on a particular distributed and federated system (Trusted Query Network) that can get useful information while protecting member data privacy and security.
  4. Design science research in information system and technology: design is creation of the new (system, algorithm, application, methodology, technique, etc.); design research in information systems is to generate new knowledge (design knowledge) through the process of designing information systems (IT artifacts) to address human or organization problems. It is an important research phase in the information systems research cycle (as opposed to the explanation research and descriptive research).