P. Pete Chong’s research while affiliated with Ming Chi University of Technology and other places

In hospitals, the anesthesia preoperative evaluation clinic helps physicians and patients estimate the risks of scheduled surgical procedures and prepare better plans. Information systems can support these assessments, but most such systems in hospitals focus primarily on displaying and storing patient records. The authors use a three-tier architecture to develop a computerized clinical procedure system with embedded medical guidelines and risk-estimating algorithms to facilitate anesthetists' risk factor assessment. The system was tested in the anesthesia department of a major hospital in Taiwan and was found to be generally accepted by anesthetists.

This study explores the potential of promoting college students' positive psychological development using popular online social networks. Online social networks have dramatically changed the ways college students manage their social relationships. Social network activities, such as checking Facebook posts dominates students' Internet time and has the potential to assist students' positive development. Positive psychology is a scientific study of how ordinary individuals can apply their strength effectively when facing objective difficulties and how this capability can be cultivated with certain approaches. A positive message delivery approach was designed for a group of new college entrants. A series of positive messages was edited by university counselors and delivered by students to their Facebook social groups. Responses from each posted positive messages were collected and analyzed by researchers. The responses indicated that: (1) relationships of individual engagement and social influence in this study can partially explain the observed student behavior; (2) using class-based social groups can promote a positive atmosphere to enhance strong-tie relationships in both the physical and virtual environments, and (3) promoting student's positive attitudes can substantially impact adolescents' future developments, and many positive attitudes can be cultivated by emotional events and social influence.

Much advancement has taken place in E-commerce, especially in the area of e-procurement. This article describes some essential characteristics of e-procurement and its role in e-commerce and industry as a whole. We also discuss some of the newer developments in e-procurement and surmise the necessary modification of these developments for companies in Taiwan.

Managers in call centers use metrics to measure organizational performance; unfortunately, these metrics only reveal how well service agents process calls. To achieve substantial quality improvement, managers need to obtain in-depth information from operational metrics such as first call resolution (FCR). This research incorporated rough set theory (RST) in analyzing FCR to produce decision rules. RST has been known to reduce the number of attributes and attribute values without affecting the original results. Data from a tariff (industry segment) call center in Taiwan were used in this study, and a four-step process was used to produce the final decision rules. The results were verified by a 10-fold cross-validation process against the decision rules produced without applying RST. The decision rules produced with RST are as effective as those produced without, but with reduced number of attributes and attribute values. This reduced decision rule set can help managers analyze the current operator procedures more efficiently and subsequently improve the call center efficiency. Without affecting effectiveness, the RST application reduces the needed number of attributes and attribute values to produce a more compact decision rule set, and this increased efficiency, in turn, allows managers to delve deeper into the operational factors.

Project and teamwork training is recognized as an important aspect in software engineering (SE) education. Senior projects, which often feature industrial involvement, serve the function of a ‘capstone course’ in SE curricula, by offering comprehensive training in collaborative software development. Given the characteristics of student team projects and the social aspects of software development, instructional issues in such a course must include: how to encourage teamwork, how to formalize and streamline stakeholder participation, and how to monitor students’ work, as well as sustain their desired collaborative effort throughout the development. In this paper, we present an exploratory study which highlights a particular case and introduces the meetings-flow approach. In order to investigate how this approach could contribute to the project's results, we examined its quantitative benefits in relation to the development of the project. We also conducted focus group interviews to discuss the humanistic findings and educational effects pertaining to this approach.

Language, both written and spoken, plays an important role in human culture. The internet, as a new medium, has changed the evolution of today's language in certain ways. Martian Language (ML), as net lingo is called in Taiwan, has been viewed with disdain, but it may contain cues to future cultural development. This study looks into how communities use ML and how this net lingo is formed and distributed. Furthermore, it identifies how the hashing functions used may affect the future. This research studies samples collected from undergraduate Management Information System (MIS) students in Taiwan and classifies ML terms into six categories according to their formation. We have also detected that their usage follows a skewed distribution and that the community affects the usage pattern of the users.

Knowledge management requires an understanding of what knowledge is before the management can be meaningful. This paper observes how modules are identified and combined to form solutions in other systems. Once these infonomes and infomemes are identified through decomposition, perhaps a more precise cause-effect mapping may be used for a more efficient information management. Finally, this paper proposes an 'I wonder' list to help assess the true information needs.

Franchising has been used by businesses as a growth strategy. Based on the authors’ cumulative research and experience in the industry, this paper describes a comprehensive framework that describes both the franchise environment — from customer services to internal operations — and the pertinent data items in the system. The authors identify the most important aspects of a franchising business, the role of online analytical processing (OLAP) and data mining play and the data items that data mining should focus on to ensure its success.

The design of an effective learning/teaching system must take into account both the contents management and the delivery tools; i.e. the knowledge to be learned and the communication methods. This paper discusses a general framework to depict the interaction of the knowledge contents and the components of communication tools that are involved in their delivery.

As the economic condition improves for most of the countries around the world, the demand for healthcare and nursing professionals have increased. However, the supply of the nurses could not keep up with the demand. Although this problem is many-fold, the necessity of nursing education should remain the centre of the discussion. A successful education program should consider both the contents management and the means of delivery, and this paper discusses how knowledge segmentation could be used to improve the nursing education, especially at the practical training stage, and how these knowledge should be distributed among different information sources (including mobile devices), and where nursing education may benefit from mobile learning.