Structural and electronic properties of Si:TiO2 interfaces from first principles

A number of transition metal oxides that serve as electron/hole selective contacts in solar cells have attracted attention due to their simple and low-cost deposition methods. Among them, TiO2 has been identified as a promising electron transport layer in Si solar cells. Experiments have shown that the Si:TiO2 interface undergoes structural changes depending on how it was fabricated. However, the sensitivity of electronic properties, such as band alignments, to different structural features of the Si:TiO2 interface is not well understood. In this thesis, first-principles calculations are performed to calculate the band alignments between Si and anatase TiO2, investigating different surface orientations and terminations. By using the vacuum-level alignment method, a 2.1 eV reduction in band offsets is observed for the O-terminated Si slab compared to other terminations. However, this large reduction in band offset is not found when using the heterointerface alignment method in which band offsets are obtained with four different heterointerface models. Even though these heterointerface models contain an excess of oxygen, their offsets agree well with the vacuum-level alignments using stoichiometric or H-terminated slabs. Moreover, a 0.4 eV increase in band offset is found for the anatase (101) surface compared to the (001) surface for both alignment methods. Additionally, different exchange-correlation treatments are investigated including rSCAN, PBE+U, and post-processing GW corrections. By considering the results of calculations on a test set of 21 semiconductors, rSCAN is demonstrated to provide more accurate band offsets than PBE, but the errors are still of order 0.7 eV. Next, the infrared spectra of two Si:TiO2 interface models are calculated to assist future spectroscopy experiments in assigning observed features to particular structures. Finally, a comparison of oxygen and hydrogen-terminated surfaces is carried out for Si and C, linking the current study to previously published work on diamond-C surfaces

Gathering Customer’s Demand Data through Web 2.0 Community: Process and Architecture

It’s one of the most critical tasks for businesses to keep track customer’s responses to their products and services in this competitive business environment. With the emergence of Web 2.0 communities and social networking websites, a relatively new media in personal communication and knowledge sharing websites, firms can leverage this additional channel to their advantage by implementing a system to monitor and collect customer’s response data. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a data collection process and a system design architecture which can be used for such purpose

Transforming Management to Support Agile Development

Agile methods have been widely adopted in the software development industry. Efforts have been made to study how to adopt and tailor agile methodologies for various types of projects. However, studies have reported that many of the challenges that today’s agile teams face do not come from within their teams, instead, they mainly come from the interaction between agile teams and their business environment. Thus, being agile is not just a task for development teams; it needs to go beyond the team level and requires transformation at the management level. This study aims to investigate how management external to agile teams needs to be redefined and transformed in order to fully support agile development

Empowering Leadership, Transactive Memory Systems and Agility in Software Development Teams: A Theoretical Framework

Empowering leadership is crucial in modern software development. However, there is a lack of studies on how empowering leadership affects agility in software development. To fill this gap, we investigate the role of empowering leadership in agility in software development through the lens of transactive memory systems (TMS) theory. In this conceptual paper, we propose a theoretical framework in which TMS plays a mediating role between empowering leadership and agility. This framework advances our understanding of the value of empowering leadership practices in developing TMS, which in turn helps software development teams achieve agility. The proposed leadership practices and their categories also provide guidelines for effectively exercising empowering leadership

26P. Enterprise Blog Categorization and Business Value

As more enterprises adopt Web 2.0 technologies, enterprise blog (EB) has become a popular and an important business tool not only for internal management but also for external interfacing with suppliers, business partners, and customers. For customer management, EB brings together two contemporary business developments, enhanced customer involvement and new forms of customer experience management. EB has been adopted by many organizations for the purpose of involving customers in product development, acquiring new customers, and providing customer with interactive experiences. However, in addition to the EB infrastructure, the effectiveness and success of such tool is largely dependent on the content. The purpose of this paper is to present a framework categorizing a rather complex and fragmented EB content domain. The framework was verified using data of 78 large multinational corporation’s enterprise blogs. A systematic overview of EB’s value and business model is explored

Examining User Technology Interaction: Toward a Sociotechnical Theory for Understanding User Adjustment to Mobile Technologies

Researchers from organization, management, and information systems areas have studied the impact of information technology (IT) on users in organizations for several decades. As a form of emerging technology, mobile computing has raised new research directions, as well as challenges for both computer scientists and social scientists. In this paper, we explore the issues of how well the emerging mobile computing technologies conform to past models and predictions that have been offered for explaining the impacts of IT. In particular, this paper identifies the general lack of attention to individual-level differences that may interact with contextual factors to shape organizational users’ reactions to this new computing paradigm. We thus propose that IS researchers consider a specific sociotechnical theory – Theory of Work Adjustment (TWA) – to investigate how individual users adjust to technology-initiated changes in work practices resulting from mobile technologies. By highlighting the insights offered by TWA, we believe that this model is useful for analyzing individual responses to the adoption of mobile computing technologies

An Inquiry-Based Learning Approach to Improve Student Learning of Analytics Concepts

Given the strong growth for big data and business analytics in industry, educational institutions have realized the growing need for analytics talent. Responding to this trend, accreditation bodies like AACSB (Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business) encourage business schools to incorporate analytical components across diverse disciplines ranging from finance to human resources. However, undergraduates usually perceive analytics as a dry, complex, and hard-to-tackle subject. In developing analytical skills, students should be able to explore on their own, make mistakes, and learn from them. Unfortunately, traditional ways of showing (in other words, pushing) the right approach to addressing/solving a problem not only hinders the development of analytical skills but also destroys the drive to explore. In this research-in-progress paper, we propose an inquiry-based learning (IBL) approach to improve student learning of analytics concepts. The central theme of our approach is to set up scenarios where students will make mistakes and motivate them to extract useful information from their mistakes to arrive at the right solution by themselves. We apply our approach to teaching a complex concept in the prescriptive part of business analytics. This approach can be adapted to teach courses like financial modeling, marketing analytics, operations management, to name a few, where problem-solving is complex and is critical to the student learning experience. We plan to empirically test the effectiveness of the teaching method in the spring 2020 semester. The plan is to create two student groups, where one group receives the traditional approach and the other, the IBL-based approach. Finally, both groups work on a new problem, and we compare the results from them. Preliminary results and implications for teaching and research will be presented at the conference