CIDRIS Research Partners

Research specialties

• Information Economics
• Electronic Commerce
• Data Communications
• Information Modeling
• Decision Support Systems
• Real-time mechanism
• Real-time databases

Jayants' research interests lie in the general area of decision support, optimization, economics and their applications to electronic commerce.

Robert Kauffman, PhD. W. P. Carey Chair in Information Systems, professor of Information Systems, Arizona State University.

"Information and Decision Sciences faculty are consistently recognized for their thought leadership,” says Kauffman, a globally recognized scholar in the field of information systems. “Our faculty build bridges that make our scholarship and teaching relevant -- across different business disciplines, in a variety of industries. We keep our fingers on the pulse of technological changes that ripple through the business economy."

His research explores some of today's hottest topics, including electronic procurement markets and technology-led supply chain management, radio frequency identification, strategic alliance formation among technology firms, the international adoption of digital wireless phone technologies, and strategic pricing on the Internet.

Professor Krishnan is an International Research Fellow of the International Center for Electronic Commerce in Korea and a Visiting Scientist at the Institute for Information Systems at Humboldt University in Germany. The institute is part of a national research center funded by the German National Science Foundation.

Professor Krishnan is the co-editor for Telecommunications and Electronic Commerce at the INFORMS Journal on Computing, and an Associate Editor for Management Science. He recently co-edited a special issue of Interfaces on e-business and is currently co-editing a special issue of Management Science on OR and E-business. He is the immediate past president of the INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and Management Science) Computing Society. He has also served on the National Science Foundation (NSF) Expert Panel on Database and Expert Systems and on several program committees of information systems conferences. Professor Krishnan, with a group of Master's students, led the development of Artsnet, a world wide web-based information service for the arts. Artsnet is currently offered as a community service by the Master of Arts Management Program at the Heinz School.

Dr. Ram has published articles in such journals as Communications of the ACM, IEEE Expert, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Information Systems, Information Systems Research, Management Science, and MIS Quarterly.

Dr. Ram's research deals with issues related to Enterprise Data Management. Her research has been funded by organizations such as, IBM, Intel Corporation, Raytheon, US ARMY, NIST, NSF, NASA , and Office of Research and Development of the CIA. Specifically, her research deals with Interoperability among Heterogeneous Database Systems, Semantic Modeling, BioInformatics and Spatio-Temporal Semantics, Business Rules Modeling, Web services Discovery and Selection, and Automated software tools for database design. Dr. Ram serves on editorial board for such journals as, Decision Support Systems, Information Systems Frontiers, Journal of Information Technology and Management, and as associate editor for Information Systems Research, Journal of Database Management, and the Journal of Systems and Software, She has chaired several workshops and conferences supported by ACM, IEEE, and AIS. She is a cofounder of the Workshop on Information Technology and Systems (WITS) and serves on the steering committee of many workshops and conferences including the Entity Relationship Conference (ER). Dr. Ram is a member of ACM, IEEE Computer Society, INFORMS, and Association for Information Systems (AIS). She is also the director of the Advanced Database Research Group based at the University of Arizona.

Dr. Ram serves as a consultant to several global companies on global E-Business strategy and technology infrastructure. She also designs, directs and teaches many executive education programs. She also donates her time to providing IT solutions and guidance to non-profit organizations including, the Community Food Bank, Native American Seed Search Program, Arizona Sonora Desert Museum, and Tucson Police Department. She received the Joseph Peggs Kalt and Margie Peggs Kalt Award for Mentoring and Doctoral Placement for the second consecutive year in 1999. In recognition of her contributions as a Professor, Scholar, Educator and Community Leadership Dr. Ram was awarded the Andersen Consulting Professor of the Year Award in March 2000. She was nominated for MBA Faculty of the Year Award in 1998 and the Graduate College Teaching and Mentoring Award in 2000. Recently, she was awarded Eller Professorship in 2001 and received "Honorable Mention" for the University of Arizona Graduate Education and Mentoring Award in 2001.

Professor Sarkar's research interests focus on the management of data and knowledge in business environments. This includes, among others, the discovery of knowledge from data repositories, schemes for representation of uncertain data in databases as well as uncertainty in knowledge bases, the integration and reconciliation of data from diverse sources in data warehousing environments, personalization and recommendation technologies, assessment of data quality in heterogeneous environments, data privacy issues, and incentive-compatibility issues for participants of knowledge management projects.