An SRU professor received an award for “Best Paper” at a symposium in Dublin, Ireland after entering his research in 2016.
Stephen Larson, an associate professor of information systems, received the award at the Pre-International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) Special Interest Group on Decision Support and Analytics (SIGDSA)/ International Federation for Information Processing Working Group 8.3 (IFIP WG8.3): Decision Support Systems., which is a part of the Association for Information Systems.
“Learning data analysis can be boring for students,” Larson said. “The data is often dry and unexciting, pulled from a firm some may have never heard of and dealing with a topic they care nothing about.”
Larson said his paper describes an exercise and lab that teaches rudimentary market basket analysis using the students’ own data, which was preferred characters for dating partners. The exercise and the lab run the students through the data gathering, data cleansing, normalization, data transformation and analysis.
Larson said the SIGDSA/IFIP WG8.3 Symposium is for academic and industry experts and professionals who share a common passion for research and pedagogy innovations in the field of business analytics and decision support science. Larson said the symposium allows for researchers to engage in discussion on analytics.
Larson said that after receiving an email that wanted papers for the symposium, he entered his into the contest.
“I believe that my case study is interesting to students, at least it is to SRU students, so I entered the paper,” Larson said.
Larson said that the paper was peer-reviewed and then scored against a rubric. Larson said the award states that the winning paper is the best of all papers submitted in each category.
Larson received the “Best Paper” award on the final day at the awards ceremony.
“I felt quite surprised,” Larson said “After submitting my paper, I was unsure it would even get accepted at a prestigious international symposium, much less win the best paper award. It was a great confidence boost.”
