Research Project
Human-Centred e-Business
Research Goal
The purpose of this project is to analysis, design and develop human-centred
e-business systems.
The human-centered design is undertaken along three dimensions, namely,
social quality, semantic and syntactic quality, and pragmatic quality.
A comprehensive human-centered e-business system development framework
along the above three dimensions is developed followed by definition of
a multi-layered multi-agent distributed e-business system architecture
at the knowledge level and the computational level.
The research involves integration of work done in areas like e-business
strategies and models, socio-technical information systems and work-oriented
design, distributed and situated cognition in cognitive science, activity
theory and psychological scales in psychology, semiotics in philosophy,
problem solving ontologies and multi-agent systems in artificial intelligence,
task based soft computing, component based software engineering, information
content based multimedia interfaces.
Acknowledgements
This project involves collaboration with William Grosky from University
of Michigan and Ernesto Damiani from University of Milan
Problem Space
E-business has revolutionized the way organizations function today. From
being just another channel a few years ago e-business has become a competitive
necessity today. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
(OECD) predicts the size of e-Business to grow to US $ 1 trillion in 2003-5.
This revolution or change in thinking can be traced along four dimensions.
These are technology, competition, deregulation and customer expectations
respectively. The Internet technology has led to “death of distance”,
digitization of almost everything, and improvement in the information
content of product and services. Along the competition dimension, customer
orientation and service and global reach have become competitive imperatives.
Deregulation of telecommunication industry and other industries, single
currency zones and ever-changing business boundaries have further increased
the potential for e-business. In fact business functions like accounting,
finance and marketing are now being researched and developed based on
enterprise resource planning systems and customer relationship management.
These systems have led to breakdown of structural and organizational barriers.
Finally, the changes along the first three dimensions have led to high
customer sophistication and expectation. The demand for cost effective
and convenient business solutions, high level of customization, and added
customer value has led to change of focus from product-centric to customer-centric
e-business systems. The customer-centric e-business systems are leading
the development towards online data mining of user’s behavior, internet-banking,
e-recruitment, customization of web sites, and interactive web-based applications.
At another level, development of knowledge management systems represents
customization, which is based on skill sets and tasks closely linked to
the needs of the users or employees within an organization or wider communities
Team Members
Rajiv Khosla, William Grosky (Univ. of Michigan), and Ernesto Damiani
(Univ. of Milan, Italy)
Publications
[1] R.Khosla, E Damiani and W. Grosky Human-Centered e-Business, Kluwer
Academic Publishers, Massachusetts, USA, March 2003, 315pages
[2] R. Khosla, and Q. Li., Unified Problem Modelling Language for Knowledge
Engineering of Complex Systems, to appear in International Journal of
Soft Computing,
Springer-Verlag, 2004
[3] E. Damiani, R. Khosla and S. Kitjongthawonkul, ' A Human-Centered
approach
for Intelligent Internet Applications. ', a chapter in a book titled Soft
Computing Agents: New Trends for Designing Autonomous Systems, Physica-Verlag,
pp182- 203, Springer June 2001
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