France Cheong

RMIT University | RMIT · School of Business IT and Logistics

As many concepts in programming are difficult for novices to learn, it can be frustrating for them to stay motivated. For this purpose, alternative approaches like game-based learning can help increase their motivation. sCool is a serious game that supports learning computational skills through conceptual aspects and practicing programming, but is...

Playing provides many opportunities for learning as learners can take charge and make choices about their learning. However, since all play is not learning, it makes sense to combine learning and playing activities. In the area of teamwork training, despite the existence of a number of learning and leisure games, there is still room for a holistic...

Course design is an important pedagogical skill that combines discipline-specific knowledge and practice with recommended ways for students to interact with course content.

To help students better understand abstract information retrieval (IR) concepts and encourage students to explore new concepts, an existing Web-based IR tool called Infret was enhanced. Based on the feedback from a previous evaluation, the need for additional IR concepts and user tracking functionality was identified. The expanded Infret version wa...

Playing provides many opportunities for learning as learners can take charge and make choices about their learning. However, since all play is not learning, it makes sense to combine learning and playing activities. In the area of teamwork training, despite the existence of a number of learning and leisure games, there is still room for a holistic...

Applying the engaging and motivating aspects of video games in non-game contexts is known as gamification. Education can benefit from gamification by improving the learning environment to make it more enjoyable and engaging for students. Factors that influence students’ preference for use of gamification are identified. Students are surveyed on the...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore how a retail distribution network can be rationalised from a spatial perspective to improve service responsiveness and delivery efficiency. Design/methodology/approach This paper applies spatial analytics to examine variability of demand, both spatially and from a service delivery perspective, for...

The landscape of higher education is shifting as the expectations of modern students move towards increased integration of digital technology in their learning environments. As such, there is a strong need for Next Generation Digital Learning Environments (NGDLEs). Two examples of NGDLEs are Motivational Active Learning (MAL) and Task-Test-Monitor...

The landscape of higher education is shifting as the expectations of modern students move towards increased integration of digital technology in their learning environments. As such, there is a strong need for Next Generation Digital Learning Environments (NGDLEs). Two examples of NGDLEs are Motivational Active Learning (MAL) and Task-Test- Monito...

Information technology is deeply ingrained in most aspects of everyday life and can be designed to influence users to behave in a certain way. Influencing students to improve their study behaviour would be a useful application of this technology. As a preamble to the design of a persuasive system for learning, we collected data to identify the stud...

Using technology to persuade people to behave in a certain way is an ever-increasing field of study. The ability to persuade individuals is quite clear in e-commerce, where individuals are persuaded to make purchasing decisions. However, it can also be applied to other disciplines, such as education where improving the study behaviour of students w...

New learning tools, media and technologies, such as computer games, mobile devices, web services and social media, have improved the way learners learn and interact to acquire knowledge and skills. Recent generation of students entering universities known as Generation NeXT are digital natives who expect information to be available at any time and...

Games offer people engaging and motivating experiences. The process of recreating this type of experience in systems that are not typically considered games is called “gamification.” Improving engagement and motivation in a learning environment is desired by many educators as traditional approaches do not seem to be as engaging as they once were wi...

Students entering into their first year of university studies are subject to a jarring difference between the learning experiences of high school and university. High schools typically take a very structured approach to teaching whereas university expects students to take ownership of their learning. This dramatic shift often means students are not...

As a precursor to the development of a gamified system to improve learning outcomes, we investigate the perception of important stakeholders, namely learners, on gamification in learning. However, as gamification is a relatively new approach/term, we neither assume that learners are knowledgeable about it nor do we attempt to explain the term in de...

Gamifying learning activities can be beneficial as it can better engage students and result in improved learning. However, incorporating game elements into learning activities can be difficult because it requires an appropriate mix of science, art, and experience. Design science research can help to address this issue. In particular, its search pro...

Gamification has the potential to improve the quality of learning by better engaging students with learning activities. Our objective in this study is to evaluate a gamified learning activity along the dimensions of learning, engagement, and enjoyment. The activity made use of a gamified multiple choice quiz implemented as a software tool and was t...

Using tweets extracted from Twitter during the Queensland 2010-2011 floods, social network analysis techniques were used to generate and analyse the online network that emerged at that time. The aim was to develop an understanding of the online community in order to identify active players and their effectiveness in disseminating critical informati...

IntroductionAustralia experienced its worst flooding disaster in 2010 and 2011 with a series of floods occurring in several states between March 2010 and February 2011. Worst of all were the Queensland floods which caused three-quarters of the state to be declared a disaster zone (Brisbane Times, 2011).In times of mass emergencies, a phenomenon kno...

In this paper Strategic Information Systems Planning (SISP) maturity models are empirically validated in Australian environment. A research instrument used to determine the degree of SISP maturity in Australian organisations is described. While empirical testing of a five-stage SISP model has only confirmed the existence of three levels of SISP mat...

Strategic Information Systems Planning (SISP) maturity model is conceptualized as a five-stage maturity model. To identify the maturity stage of SISP, a model for assessment of SISP is developed. The development of these models is based on the ‘Integral Engineering’ approach and a unique implementation of the Analytical Network Process theory (ANP)...

This paper aims to identify areas of economic value and analyse spatial variability of demand and services delivery patterns for an auto-parts retail network. The spatial analysis undertaken was based on transportation and delivery of products out of ‘point of sale’ stores to customers. Results show that customer demand in terms of revenue tends to...

Strategic decision makers are frequently faced with unstructured problems that cannot be solved adequately by analytical means. In such situations, a better decision-making approach is one based on stakeholders’ participation. A particular form of such an approach is known as participatory modelling, whereby participatory methods are used for kno...

This study examines the use of formal Strategic Information Systems Planning (SISP) approaches and methodologies in Australia. The authors analyze the relationships between SISP success, SISP objectives, company size/type and SISP approaches and methodologies. The authors find that the most popular methodologies are not the most successful. Emergin...

The development of a prototype DSS, named Fish@Risk, for risk management in Vietnamese catfish farming is detailed in this paper. The prototype enables aquaculture farmers to manage risks in catfish farming systematically and efficiently. It facilitates risk analysis, risk evaluation and prioritization, and selection of the most efficient risk mana...

An important aspect of education is to promote higher-order thinking skills to learners. However, in the lecture environment, learners are passively engaged and it is unlikely for higher-order thinking to occur. Although interventions such as "clickers" can be used to increase engagement in lectures, this does not necessarily promote higher-order t...

This study examines the use of formal Strategic Information Systems Planning (SISP) approaches and methodologies in Australia. The authors analyze the relationships between SISP success, SISP objectives, company size/type and SISP approaches and methodologies. The authors find that the most popular methodologies are not the most successful. Emergin...

Strategic decision makers are frequently faced with unstructured problems that cannot be solved adequately by analytical means. In such situations, a better decision-making approach is one based on stakeholders’ participation. A particular form of such an approach is known as participatory modelling, whereby participatory methods are used for knowl...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to describe multiple case studies based on free/open‐source software (F/OSS) web applications. F/OSS web applications were deployed to create a demo web‐portal for Swiss small‐ and medium‐sized tourism enterprises (SMTEs). The web‐portal will demonstrate web applications for the purpose of F/OSS awareness and th...

Strategic Information Systems Planning SISP maturity model is conceptualized as a five-stage maturity model. To identify the maturity stage of SISP, a model for assessment of SISP is developed. The development of these models is based on the 'Integral Engineering' approach and a unique implementation of the Analytical Network Process theory ANP. Th...

In this paper Strategic Information Systems Planning SISP maturity models are empirically validated in Australian environment. A research instrument used to determine the degree of SISP maturity in Australian organisations is described. While empirical testing of a five-stage SISP model has only confirmed the existence of three levels of SISP matur...

In this paper, our focus is the study of remanufacturing activity, which is one of the main recovery methods applied in closed loop supply chains. In particular, we model a production and inventory system for remanufacturing using a System Dynamics simulation modelling approach. The aim is to explore the dynamics of the remanufacturing process and...

Using tweets extracted from Twitter during the Australian 2010-2011 floods, social network analysis techniques were used to generate and analyse the online networks that emerged at that time. The aim was to develop an understanding of the online communities for the Queensland, New South Wales and Victorian floods in order to identify active players...

The purpose of this study is to examine the combined effect of self-efficacy and academic integration on higher education students studying IT (Information Technology) majors in Taiwan. We introduced self-efficacy, which is a psychological factor that affects students’ academic outcomes, as a new factor in Tinto’ theory, a well-known framework in s...

Although Vietnamese catfish farming has grown at a rapid rate in recent years, the industry has also faced many problems that affect its sustainability. This paper explores the perceptions of catfish farmers regarding risk and risk management strategies in their production activities. The relationships between farm and farmer socioeconomic characte...

The purpose of this study is to explore an Information System (IS) student retention model by modifying the integrated model of Tinto and Bean. The proposed model extends the integrated model by adding a construct named self-efficacy which is a psychological factor borrowed from self-efficacy theory. Data was collected from six private institutions...

Credit scoring has become a very important task in the credit industry and its use has increased at a phenomenal speed through the mass issue of credit cards since the 1960s. This paper compares the classification performance of the most commonly used traditional statistical as well as intelligent systems techniques against a new artificial intelli...

Project-based learning provides students an authentic learning experience in which they are able to practice skills by constructing a sharable artifact. Internships are another approach in which stu-dents are given a real life work experience by being placed and working in an actual workplace. Thus, in this paper, we present an exploratory case stu...

Traditionally, the social aspect of project-based learning was mainly in the form of face-to-face communication and supplemented by online media such as email and discussion boards. With the emergence of Web 2.0, social networking sites, which are renowned for their strong social element, appear to be another useful tool to further support the soci...

Although the Vietnamese catfish farming has grown at very high rates in recent years, the industry has also faced many problems affecting its sustainability. This paper studies the perceptions of catfish farmers regarding risk and risk management strategies in their production activities. Specifically, the study aims to measure the consequences, li...

This assessment involves evaluating the scope for business process improvement at Mattel, a large US-based toy manufacturer. Students are required to conduct research into Mattel’s existing business processes, identify areas of improvement, and propose a business process management initiative that can be implemented within the firm. This assessment...

Selecting better predictive variables is fundamental for scorecards to perform well. This study makes use of a large credit scoring dataset and investigates the application of several variable selection techniques for scorecard development. The scorecards are developed using a statistical technique (logistic regression) and two AI methods (SAIS and...

This assessment examines the technical, managerial and organisational challenges involved in implementing a centralised database at the Royal Flying Doctor Service of Australia (RFDS). Students are asked to propose a comprehensive database strategy for handling operational data and data warehousing. This assessment is suitable for use in both under...

Asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) operates in a connection-oriented mode; if sufficient resources are not available for transporting data over a network, the connection is refused. Connection admission control (CAC) deals with the question of whether or not an ATM switch can accept a new connection. This paper presents the design of a fuzzy logic co...

This study examined the relationship between academic integration and self-efficacy with regard to institution types and students’ majors among IM (Information Management) and CS (Computer Science) students. A Taiwanese National survey database was used to achieve the research objective. MANOVA was used to analyze the interaction effects between ac...

The management of remanufacturing activities requires new techniques in order to improve these systems for cost optimized operations. However, several factors make the operations of the reverse logistics process difficult. In particular, uncertainties in quantity, quality and timing of returns negatively affect remanufacturing activities such as pr...

Social network analysis (SNA) is a sociological approach for analysing patterns of relationships and interactions between social actors. In this paper, we used SNA to analyse the network of co-authors who published in the Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems (PACIS) with the aim of developing an understanding of the research community tha...

The 'SISP community' is an evolving environment, which generally learns from the past. However, the lesson that top management commitment is a key determinant of SISP success has not been learnt. Regardless of the industry type or size, a lack of real commitment from senior management is still the main reason for the SISP formulation and implementa...

Using bibliographic data extracted from an Endnote database, social network analysis techniques were used to generate and analyse a network of co-authors with the aim of developing an understanding of the research community that produces the research knowledge published by the Australasian Conference on Information Systems (ACIS). The ACIS communit...

Tourism is considered as an important economic sector in all OECD countries, especially Switzerland, for making significant contributions to their national economies in terms of employment, gross domestic product and services export (OECD 2008c). Lately, Switzerland's tourism industry is witnessing increased competition because of reduced demand, i...

Online discussions are popular in virtual classrooms since they provide students with opportunities for more effective interactions than possible in traditional classrooms. However, grading online discussions is well-known to be a time-consuming task. In this paper, we propose a method for automating the partial grading of online discussions using...

A problem-based learning (PBL) teaching and learning approach was trialled to improve stu- dents' learning experience in an Intelligent Systems postgraduate course. The first part of the course was taught using the traditional lecture followed by tutorial while the PBL approach was used to teach the remainder of the course. The PBL approach was eva...

Current artificial immune system (AIS) classifiers have two major problems: 1) their populations of B-cells can grow to huge proportions, and 2) optimizing one B-cell (part of the classifier) at a time does not necessarily guarantee that the B-cell pool (the whole classifier) will be optimized. In this paper, the design of a new AIS algorithm and c...

Credit scoring has become a very important task in the credit industry and its use has increased at a phenomenal speed through the mass issue of credit cards since the 1960s. This paper compares the performance of current classifiers against an artificial intelligence technique based on the natural immune system, named simple artificial immune syst...

Fuzzy systems suffer from the curse of dimensionality as the number of rules increases exponentially with the number of input dimensions. Although several methods have been proposed for eliminating the combinatorial rule explosion, none of them is fully satisfactory as there are no known fuzzy systems that can handle a large number of inputs so far...

With the availability of a wide range of Evolutionary Algorithms such as Genetic Algorithms, Evo- lutionary Programming, Evolutionary Strategies and Differential Evolution, every conceivable aspect of the design of a fuzzy logic controller has been optimized and automated. Although there is no doubt that these automated techniques can produce an op...

Available Bit Rate (ABR) streams are carried whenever bandwidth is available to do so. When transporting MPEG streams over ATM networks, the link utilization cannot be brought close to 100% no matter how efficient the connection control admission scheme is, but can be improved by ABR traffic. Due to the unpredictable fluctuations and burstiness of...

In conventional fuzzy logic controllers, the computational complexity increases with the dimensions of the system variables; the number of rules increases exponentially as the number of system variables increases. Hierarchical fuzzy logic controllers (HFLC) have been introduced to reduce the number of rules to a linear function of system variables....

Current artificial immune system (AIS) classifiers have two major problems: (1) their populations of B-cells can grow to huge proportions and (2) optimizing one B-cell (part of the classifier) at a time does not necessarily guarantee that the B-cell pool (the whole classifier) will be optimized. In this paper, we describe the design of a new AIS al...

This study is part of a longer-term program in which we are working with an Australian Bank to improve its software development risk management practices. The sub-process under study is the project completion review process that is often used in companies as a means of formalizing and crystallizing the findings of a project at its conclusion. The r...

We present, discuss and analyse the findings of a recently completed questionnaire survey conducted within a large Australian organization in relation to a case study based empirical research project on above topic. Key aspects of the topic, including its research trends, rationale, barriers, influencing factors and performance measures are discuss...

Mobile commerce refers to business activities over mobile terminals. A system dynamics (SD) approach is used to analyze how the strategic planning of the mobile commerce terminal (MCT) industry will influence the process of mobile commerce diffusion in a market. We study mobile commerce market development in a country as a dynamic social economic s...

We describe a method for tuning Fuzzy Logic Controllers (FLCs) which is not based on expert knowledge or trial and error. The method consists of generating one or more control tables and using an Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) to optimize only the membership functions as it is straightforward to map the entries of the control table to a rule base. We...

With the changing role of the student from participant to customer, universities should examine their level of customer service. Using a questionnaire adapted from the Student Satisfaction Inventory (SSI), this study assessed the differences in expectations, as examined by importance scores, satisfaction scores, and performance gap scores of RMIT B...

With the changing role of the student from participant to customer, universities should examine their level of customer service. Using a questionnaire adapted from the Student Satisfaction Inventory (SSI), this study assessed the differences in expectations, as examined by importance scores, satisfaction scores, and performance gap scores of RMIT B...

Although fuzzy systems and artificial neural networks are both universal function approximators, fuzzy systems have the advantage of using a form of knowledge representation which in general is interpretable by human beings. However, unlike neural networks, fuzzy systems have no built-in learning mechanism. To compensate for this deficiency, geneti...

With the availability of a wide range of evolutionary algorithms such as genetic algorithms, evolutionary programming, evolution strategies and differential evolution, every conceivable aspect of the design of a fuzzy logic controller has been optimized and automated. Although there is no doubt that these automated techniques can produce an optimal...

Fuzzy logic controllers (FLCs) are gaining in popularity across a broad array of disciplines because they allow a more human approach to control. Recently, the design of the fuzzy sets and the rule base has been automated by the use of genetic algorithms (GAs) which are powerful search techniques. Though the use of GAs can produce near optimal FLCs...

EASE (R. Lai, A. Lo, EASE: a software environment for automatic implementation of application protocol, Software—Practice and Experience, 26(1) (1996) 83–103) is a software tool that integrates Estelle and ASN.1 (Abstract Syntax Notation One) specifications to produce an integrated specification for application layer protocol, from which an automat...

The drastic improvement of network performance in terms of throughput and error rate coupled with the continuous increase in power of end-systems have led to the emergence of a variety of distributed Multimedia (MM) applications. The performance levels required by the distributed MM systems are expressed as Quality of Service (QoS). Network QoS sup...

In conventional fuzzy logic controllers, the computational complexity increases with the dimensions of the system variables; the number of rules increases exponentially as the number of system variables increases, Hierarchical fuzzy logic controllers have been introduced to reduce the number of rules to a linear function of system variables. Howeve...

Variable bit rate (VBR) video is very bursty and its transportation over ATM networks is problematic because bandwidth has to be reserved in advance. Studies have shown that VBR video exhibits statistical self-similarity: it displays structural similarities across a wide range of time scales. To date, studies on the burstiness of MPEG compressed bi...

Credit scoring is one of the most successful applications in banking and fi-nance. However, most studies do not explain the whole process of scorecard development, probably due to the difficulty in obtaining credit scoring data. This study addresses some of the gaps that are present in the existing liter-ature in that it explains in detail the proc...

A simple artificial immune system (SAIS), which was previously developed, can predict class outcomes accurately and therefore has good classification accuracy, which is the percentage of correctly classified data. Classification accuracy works well on balanced datasets; however, since in this study, a large unbalanced dataset was obtained, classifi...

Selecting new and more predictive variables is fundamental for scorecards to perform well. This study makes use of a very large set of credit scoring data and investigates the application of several variable selection techniques for scorecard development. Among the four different techniques used, stepwise regression, which is currently the most pop...