352 research outputs found

    Reimagining the Journal Editorial Process: An AI-Augmented Versus an AI-Driven Future

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    The editorial process at our leading information systems journals has been pivotal in shaping and growing our field. But this process has grown long in the tooth and is increasingly frustrating and challenging its various stakeholders: editors, reviewers, and authors. The sudden and explosive spread of AI tools, including advances in language models, make them a tempting fit in our efforts to ease and advance the editorial process. But we must carefully consider how the goals and methods of AI tools fit with the core purpose of the editorial process. We present a thought experiment exploring the implications of two distinct futures for the information systems powering today’s journal editorial process: an AI-augmented and an AI-driven one. The AI-augmented scenario envisions systems providing algorithmic predictions and recommendations to enhance human decision-making, offering enhanced efficiency while maintaining human judgment and accountability. However, it also requires debate over algorithm transparency, appropriate machine learning methods, and data privacy and security. The AI-driven scenario, meanwhile, imagines a fully autonomous and iterative AI. While potentially even more efficient, this future risks failing to align with academic values and norms, perpetuating data biases, and neglecting the important social bonds and community practices embedded in and strengthened by the human-led editorial process. We consider and contrast the two scenarios in terms of their usefulness and dangers to authors, reviewers, editors, and publishers. We conclude by cautioning against the lure of an AI-driven, metric-focused approach, advocating instead for a future where AI serves as a tool to augment human capacity and strengthen the quality of academic discourse. But more broadly, this thought experiment allows us to distill what the editorial process is about: the building of a premier research community instead of chasing metrics and efficiency. It is up to us to guard these values

    Comparison of Various Machine Learning Models for Estimating Construction Projects Sales Valuation Using Economic Variables and Indices

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    The capability of various machine learning techniques in predicting construction project profit in residential buildings using a combination of economic variables and indices (EV&Is) and physical and financial variables (P&F) as input variables remain uncertain. Although recent studies have primarily focused on identifying the factors influencing the sales of construction projects due to their significant short-term impact on a country's economy, the prediction of these parameters is crucial for ensuring project sustainability. While techniques such as regression and artificial neural networks have been utilized to estimate construction project sales, limited research has been conducted in this area. The application of machine learning techniques presents several advantages over conventional methods, including reductions in cost, time, and effort. Therefore, this study aims to predict the sales valuation of construction projects using various machine learning approaches, incorporating different EV&Is and P&F as input features for these models and subsequently generating the sales valuation as the output. This research will undertake a comparative analysis to investigate the efficiency of the different machine learning models, identifying the most effective approach for estimating the sales valuation of construction projects. By leveraging machine learning techniques, it is anticipated that the accuracy of sales valuation predictions will be enhanced, ultimately resulting in more sustainable and successful construction projects. In general, the findings of this research reveal that the extremely randomized trees model delivers the best performance, while the decision tree model exhibits the least satisfactory performance in predicting the sales valuation of construction projects

    Driving venture capital funding efficiencies through data driven models. Why is this important and what are its implications for the startup ecosystem?

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    This thesis aims to test whether data models can fit the venture capital funding process better, and if they do fit, can they help improve the venture capital funding efficiency? Based on the reported results, venture capitalists can only see returns in 20% of their investments. The thesis argues that it is essential to help venture capital investment as it can help drive economic growth through investments in innovation. The thesis considers four startup scenarios and the related investment factors. The scenarios are a funded artificial intelligence startup seeking follow-on funding, a new startup seeking first funding, the survivability of a sustainability-focused startup, and the importance of patents for exit. Patents are a proxy for innovation in this thesis. Through quantitative analysis using generalized linear models, logit regressions, and t-tests, the thesis can establish that data models can identify the relative significance of funding factors. Once the factor significance is established, it can be deployed in a model. Building the machine learning model has been considered outside the scope of this thesis. A mix of academic and real-world research has been used for the data analysis of this thesis. Accelerators and venture capitalists also used some of the results to improve their own processes. Many of the models have shifted from a prediction to factor significance. This thesis implies that it could help venture capitalists plan for a 10% efficiency improvement. From an academic perspective, this study focuses on the entire life of a startup, from the first funding stage to the exit. It also links the startup ecosystem with economic development. Two additional factors from the study are the regional perspective of funding differences between Asia, Europe, and the US and that this study would include the recent economic sentiment. The impact of the funding slowdown has been measured through a focus on first funding and longitudinal validations of the data decision before the slowdown. Based on the results of the thesis, data models are a credible alternative and show significant correlations between returns and factors. It is advisable for a venture capitalist to consider these

    An empirical investigation of the relationship between integration, dynamic capabilities and performance in supply chains

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    This research aimed to develop an empirical understanding of the relationships between integration, dynamic capabilities and performance in the supply chain domain, based on which, two conceptual frameworks were constructed to advance the field. The core motivation for the research was that, at the stage of writing the thesis, the combined relationship between the three concepts had not yet been examined, although their interrelationships have been studied individually. To achieve this aim, deductive and inductive reasoning logics were utilised to guide the qualitative study, which was undertaken via multiple case studies to investigate lines of enquiry that would address the research questions formulated. This is consistent with the author’s philosophical adoption of the ontology of relativism and the epistemology of constructionism, which was considered appropriate to address the research questions. Empirical data and evidence were collected, and various triangulation techniques were employed to ensure their credibility. Some key features of grounded theory coding techniques were drawn upon for data coding and analysis, generating two levels of findings. These revealed that whilst integration and dynamic capabilities were crucial in improving performance, the performance also informed the former. This reflects a cyclical and iterative approach rather than one purely based on linearity. Adopting a holistic approach towards the relationship was key in producing complementary strategies that can deliver sustainable supply chain performance. The research makes theoretical, methodological and practical contributions to the field of supply chain management. The theoretical contribution includes the development of two emerging conceptual frameworks at the micro and macro levels. The former provides greater specificity, as it allows meta-analytic evaluation of the three concepts and their dimensions, providing a detailed insight into their correlations. The latter gives a holistic view of their relationships and how they are connected, reflecting a middle-range theory that bridges theory and practice. The methodological contribution lies in presenting models that address gaps associated with the inconsistent use of terminologies in philosophical assumptions, and lack of rigor in deploying case study research methods. In terms of its practical contribution, this research offers insights that practitioners could adopt to enhance their performance. They can do so without necessarily having to forgo certain desired outcomes using targeted integrative strategies and drawing on their dynamic capabilities

    Optimizing B2B Product Offers with Machine Learning, Mixed Logit, and Nonlinear Programming

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    In B2B markets, value-based pricing and selling has become an important alternative to discounting. This study outlines a modeling method that uses customer data (product offers made to each current or potential customer, features, discounts, and customer purchase decisions) to estimate a mixed logit choice model. The model is estimated via hierarchical Bayes and machine learning, delivering customer-level parameter estimates. Customer-level estimates are input into a nonlinear programming next-offer maximization problem to select optimal features and discount level for customer segments, where segments are based on loyalty and discount elasticity. The mixed logit model is integrated with economic theory (the random utility model), and it predicts both customer perceived value for and response to alternative future sales offers. The methodology can be implemented to support value-based pricing and selling efforts. Contributions to the literature include: (a) the use of customer-level parameter estimates from a mixed logit model, delivered via a hierarchical Bayes estimation procedure, to support value-based pricing decisions; (b) validation that mixed logit customer-level modeling can deliver strong predictive accuracy, not as high as random forest but comparing favorably; and (c) a nonlinear programming problem that uses customer-level mixed logit estimates to select optimal features and discounts

    Deep Neural Networks and Tabular Data: Inference, Generation, and Explainability

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    Over the last decade, deep neural networks have enabled remarkable technological advancements, potentially transforming a wide range of aspects of our lives in the future. It is becoming increasingly common for deep-learning models to be used in a variety of situations in the modern life, ranging from search and recommendations to financial and healthcare solutions, and the number of applications utilizing deep neural networks is still on the rise. However, a lot of recent research efforts in deep learning have focused primarily on neural networks and domains in which they excel. This includes computer vision, audio processing, and natural language processing. It is a general tendency for data in these areas to be homogeneous, whereas heterogeneous tabular datasets have received relatively scant attention despite the fact that they are extremely prevalent. In fact, more than half of the datasets on the Google dataset platform are structured and can be represented in a tabular form. The first aim of this study is to provide a thoughtful and comprehensive analysis of deep neural networks' application to modeling and generating tabular data. Apart from that, an open-source performance benchmark on tabular data is presented, where we thoroughly compare over twenty machine and deep learning models on heterogeneous tabular datasets. The second contribution relates to synthetic tabular data generation. Inspired by their success in other homogeneous data modalities, deep generative models such as variational autoencoders and generative adversarial networks are also commonly applied for tabular data generation. However, the use of Transformer-based large language models (which are also generative) for tabular data generation have been received scant research attention. Our contribution to this literature consists of the development of a novel method for generating tabular data based on this family of autoregressive generative models that, on multiple challenging benchmarks, outperformed the current state-of-the-art methods for tabular data generation. Another crucial aspect for a deep-learning data system is that it needs to be reliable and trustworthy to gain broader acceptance in practice, especially in life-critical fields. One of the possible ways to bring trust into a data-driven system is to use explainable machine-learning methods. In spite of this, the current explanation methods often fail to provide robust explanations due to their high sensitivity to the hyperparameter selection or even changes of the random seed. Furthermore, most of these methods are based on feature-wise importance, ignoring the crucial relationship between variables in a sample. The third aim of this work is to address both of these issues by offering more robust and stable explanations, as well as taking into account the relationships between variables using a graph structure. In summary, this thesis made a significant contribution that touched many areas related to deep neural networks and heterogeneous tabular data as well as the usage of explainable machine learning methods

    Deep churn prediction method for telecommunication industry

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    Being able to predict the churn rate is the key to success for the telecommunication industry. It is also important for the telecommunication industry to obtain a high profit. Thus, the challenge is to predict the churn percentage of customers with higher accuracy without comprising the profit. In this study, various types of learning strategies are investigated to address this challenge and build a churn predication model. Ensemble learning techniques (Adaboost, random forest (RF), extreme randomized tree (ERT), xgboost (XGB), gradient boosting (GBM), and bagging and stacking), traditional classification techniques (logistic regression (LR), decision tree (DT), and k-nearest neighbor (kNN), and artificial neural network (ANN)), and the deep learning convolutional neural network (CNN) technique have been tested to select the best model for building a customer churn prediction model. The evaluation of the proposed models was conducted using two pubic datasets: Southeast Asian telecom industry, and American telecom market. On both of the datasets, CNN and ANN returned better results than the other techniques. The accuracy obtained on the first dataset using CNN was 99% and using ANN was 98%, and on the second dataset it was 98% and 99%, respectively

    Antecedents of ESG-Related Corporate Misconduct: Theoretical Considerations and Machine Learning Applications

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    The core objective of this cumulative dissertation is to generate new insights in the occurrence and prediction of unethical firm behavior disclosure. The first two papers investigate predictors and antecedents of (severe) unethical firm behavior disclosure. The third paper addresses frequently occurring methodological issues when applying machine learning approaches within marketing research. Hence, the three papers of this dissertation contribute to two recent topics within the field of marketing: First, marketing research has already focused intensively on the consequences of corporate misconduct and the accompanying media coverage. Meanwhile, the prediction and the process of occurrence of such threatening events have been examined only sporadically so far. Second, companies and researchers are increasingly implementing machine learning as a methodology to solve marketing-specific tasks. In this context, the users of machine learning methods often face methodological challenges, for which this dissertation reviews possible solutions. Specifically, in study 1, machine learning algorithms are used to predict the future occurrence of severe threatening news coverage of corporate misconduct. Study 2 identifies relationships between the specific competitive situation of a company within its industry and unethical firm behavior disclosure. Study 3 addresses machine learning-based issues for marketing researchers and presents possible solutions by reviewing the computer science literature

    Technology Adoption Within UK Retail Construction: An Analysis of the Technology Adoption Model (TAM) on Addressing Barriers Preventing Technology Adoption as a Solution to Productivity

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    The UK construction industry has long been discussed for its low productivity rates and its slow adoption of technologies. This thesis looked to analyse key barriers that are preventing UK Retail Construction organisations from successfully adopting new technologies, in order to find a resolution to the productivity issues faced by the sector. The research utilised the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) framework to explore relationships between the primary data and the literature review and provide recommendations to contractors and organisations in practise within the specific sector. Research was undertaken using an extensive literature review and primary data gathering to establish correlations between the two and understand the key barriers and potential solutions to the problem. The literature review found that productivity levels within the sector have continued to fall short against other sectors and industries, and using information from other industries, identified that technology adoption is a key solution to overcome productivity shortfalls. It then identified that within the UK Retail Construction sector, technology adoption also lags behind the industry curve. The research used a mixedmethodology approach to the primary data; using a quantitative online survey questionnaire and qualitative semi-structured interviews, with a triangulation method of data review. The findings from the primary data, aligned with the TAM framework and literature review, highlighted that within the sector, the key barriers to technology adoption are individuals preconceived perceptions of technology usefulness and ease of use, influencing the attitude towards technology and its adoption success rate. It was also found that external factors not directly considered within the TAM model and outside of individuals behaviours, impact the success of the technology adoption (heterogeneous constraints, costs, time, client influence). The review of the data against the TAM framework has provided the basis for recommendations that can be used in practise to improve technology adoption success rates.Such as the need to produce a clear business case for each technology adoption and communicate the business problem and technology solution with the stakeholders, to influence the attitude through the process. It also identified the need for organisations to identify the external constraints (time, cost, repeatability) on each case study and limit the adoption aspirations within these constraints. The research looked to impact existing literature by critically analysing the TAM framework against the findings from this specific field of research and has identified the need to consider such external factors. The conclusion chapter provided recommendations on ways in which policies and research can be addressed to overcome the barriers identified and provided considerations for organisations in practice and research academics for any future works

    Forecasting Carbon Dioxide Emission in Thailand Using Machine Learning Techniques

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    Machine Learning (ML) models and the massive quantity of data accessible provide useful tools for analyzing the advancement of climate change trends and identifying major contributors. Random Forest (RF), Gradient Boosting Regression (GBR), XGBoost (XGB), Support Vector Machines (SVC), Decision Trees (DT), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Principal Component Analysis (PCA), ensemble methods, and Genetic Algorithms (GA) are used in this study to predict CO2 emissions in Thailand. A variety of evaluation criteria are used to determine how well these models work, including R-squared (R2), mean absolute error (MAE), root mean squared error (RMSE), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), and correctness.  The results show that the RF and XGB algorithms function exceptionally well, with high R-squared values and low error rates.  KNN, PCA, ensemble methods, and GA, on the other hand, outperform the top-performing models. Their lower R-squared values and higher error scores indicate that they are unable to accurately anticipate CO2 emissions. This paper contributes to the field of environmental modeling by comparing the effectiveness of various machine learning approaches in forecasting CO2 emissions. The findings can assist Thailand in promoting sustainable development and developing policies that are consistent with worldwide efforts to combat climate change
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