Managing the Unmanageable: How IS Research Can Contribute to the Scholarship of Cyber Projects

Cyber projects are large-scale efforts to implement computer, information, and communication technologies in scientific communities. These projects seek to build scientific cyberinfrastructure that will promote new scientific collaborations and transform science in novel and unimagined ways. Their scope and complexity, the number and diversity of stakeholders, and their transformational goals make cyber projects extremely challenging to understand and manage. Consequently, scholars from multiple disciplines, including computer science, information science, sociology, and information systems, have begun to study cyber projects and their impacts. As IS scholars, our goal is to contribute to this growing body of inter-disciplinary knowledge by considering three areas of IS research that are particularly germane to this class of project, given their characteristics: development approaches, conflict, and success factors. After describing cyber projects, we explore how IS research findings in these three areas are relevant for cyber projects, and suggest promising avenues of future research. We conclude by discussing the importance and unique challenges of cyber projects and propose that, given our expertise and knowledge of project management, IS researchers are particularly well suited to contribute to the inter-disciplinary study of these projects

The Role of Knowledge in Information Technology Project Governance

IT governance, the distribution of decision-making concerning IT, has primarily been studied at the organizational or, more recently, the business unit level. However, many IT decisions take place in the context of IT projects, making it important to understand governance issues at the project level. This research develops a project-level conceptualization of IT governance that draws from both the governance and project management literatures. A model of how IT project governance arrangements are influenced by the distribution of business and IT knowledge and the impact on project performance is also proposed. This model will be tested using matched surveys from business and IT managers involved in IT projects

Genetic Associations with Plasma B12, B6, and Folate Levels in an Ischemic Stroke Population from the Vitamin Intervention for Stroke Prevention (VISP) Trial

Background: B vitamins play an important role in homocysteine metabolism, with vitamin deficiencies resulting in increased levels of homocysteine and increased risk for stroke. We performed a genome-wide association study (GWAS) in 2,100 stroke patients from the Vitamin Intervention for Stroke Prevention (VISP) trial, a clinical trial designed to determine whether the daily intake of high-dose folic acid, vitamins B6, and B12 reduce recurrent cerebral infarction. Methods: Extensive quality control (QC) measures resulted in a total of 737,081 SNPs for analysis. Genome-wide association analyses for baseline quantitative measures of folate, Vitamins B12, and B6 were completed using linear regression approaches, implemented in PLINK. Results: Six associations met or exceeded genome-wide significance (P ≤ 5 × 10−08). For baseline Vitamin B12, the strongest association was observed with a non-synonymous SNP (nsSNP) located in the CUBN gene (P = 1.76 × 10−13). Two additional CUBN intronic SNPs demonstrated strong associations with B12 (P = 2.92 × 10−10 and 4.11 × 10−10), while a second nsSNP, located in the TCN1 gene, also reached genome-wide significance (P = 5.14 × 10−11). For baseline measures of Vitamin B6, we identified genome-wide significant associations for SNPs at the ALPL locus (rs1697421; P = 7.06 × 10−10 and rs1780316; P = 2.25 × 10−08). In addition to the six genome-wide significant associations, nine SNPs (two for Vitamin B6, six for Vitamin B12, and one for folate measures) provided suggestive evidence for association (P ≤ 10−07). Conclusion: Our GWAS study has identified six genome-wide significant associations, nine suggestive associations, and successfully replicated 5 of 16 SNPs previously reported to be associated with measures of B vitamins. The six genome-wide significant associations are located in gene regions that have shown previous associations with measures of B vitamins; however, four of the nine suggestive associations represent novel finding and warrant further investigation in additional populations

Active site prediction using evolutionary and structural information

Motivation: The identification of catalytic residues is a key step in understanding the function of enzymes. While a variety of computational methods have been developed for this task, accuracies have remained fairly low. The best existing method exploits information from sequence and structure to achieve a precision (the fraction of predicted catalytic residues that are catalytic) of 18.5% at a corresponding recall (the fraction of catalytic residues identified) of 57% on a standard benchmark. Here we present a new method, Discern, which provides a significant improvement over the state-of-the-art through the use of statistical techniques to derive a model with a small set of features that are jointly predictive of enzyme active sites