Published: Jan. 6, 2020

Associate professor of Information Management Kai Larsen; Jingjing Li (´13, PhD), who is now an assistant professor at the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia; and Ahmed Abbasi, associate dean and Murray Research chaired professor of Information Technology at the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce, recently received the 2019 INFORMS ISS Design Science Award.

The INFORMS ISS Design Science Award recognizes research efforts that use an experimental research approach, such as building and evaluating working IT systems or creating IT artifacts. The award “is principally focused on the quality, novelty and significance of the IT artifact created and validated,” and is widely seen as the top award for design scientists.

Larsen, Li and Abbasi are credited with developing a search engine for behavioral research, which in design experiments outperformed Google’s academic search engine by between 40% and 120%.

Their design is grounded on their paper “Theoryon: A Design Framework and System For Unlocking Behavioral Knowledge Through Ontology Learning.” The paper has been conditionally accepted by the top information systems journal; MIS Quarterly.

Congratulations to professors Larsen, Li and Abbasi.