General Information
| Lecturer | Prof. Dr. Armin Heinzl |
|---|---|
| Course Format | Thesis |
| Credit Points | 12 ECTS |
| Language | English |
| Information for Students | Information regarding theses of other degree courses can be found at our academic theses page. |
Course Information
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Brief Description
Individuals and organizations operate in a world that is increasingly permeated with digital technology. Every day we interact with Information Systems (IS) that make our phones smart, our cars safe, and our lives convenient. Likewise, Information Systems are embedded in the very core of the products, operations, and strategies of many organizations. Ever more, understanding and leveraging Information Systems is key to business success, not only for large and experienced players like SAP and Google, but also for small start-ups. The pervasive nature of digital technology is radically transforming our understanding of Information Systems, encompassing their development, coordination, use, and the way we interact with them. The primary objective of this seminar is to shed light on these issues and enrich our knowledge about how information systems impact organizations and individuals.
topics
Topic Topic Description Supervisor A: Healthcare IT Go-to market of M2OLIE technologies and systems The M²OLIE (“Mannheim Molecular Intervention Environment“) is one of nine Research Campuses in Germany that have been funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. We use a multidisciplinary approach to work towards a common objective: Innovative cancer tumor therapies by the means of medical robot-assisted patient imaging and molecular intervention. Based at the University Medical Centre Mannheim, the PPP consists of a consortium of 30 renowned research and industry partners. Among them are Porsche Consulting and the University of Mannheim who are now supporting the consortium to push the developed innovations into the marketplace. Further information can be found at http://www.m2olie.de/en/. After eight years of intense work, our innovations are almost market ready. Thus, we are looking for a motivated and talented student at the intersection of entrepreneurship, innovation management and information systems who supports us in exploring, preparing, and improving our go-to-market phase. The expected activities are: – Profound analysis of the elaborated innovations by the research campus in cooperation with the key innovators (medical doctors, mechanical engineers, biotech engineers, and software engineers); – Thorough analysis of the global market with respect to similar or neighboring core innovations; – Development of a portfolio concept, that determines and prioritizes the medical product and service strategy of the M2OLIE innovation portfolio for incubating spin-offs. The project is unique in a way that the innovation height and consortium strength is difficult to find elsewhere. The Bachelor thesis will be conducted in cooperation with Dr. Till Giese, Porsche Consulting (https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-till-giese-80038430/). It is our objective to prepare for one or multiple spin-offs to transfer our innovations into practice. Prof. Dr. Armin Heinzl B: Demand Spillovers in Digital Platforms The success and economic relevance of digital platform business models are unprecedented: Many of the most valuable companies in the world, including Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon, operate digital platforms. Digital platforms act as intermediaries and provide a foundation to facilitate interactions among producers (e.g., app developers on Apple iOS) and consumers (e.g., iPhone users) of complementary products (e.g., mobile apps). Platforms significantly change how markets are organized: In contrast to traditional seller-buyer relationships, value creation in platforms is orchestrated within an ecosystem of loosely-coupled complementors. Platform changes, market entry or growth of complementors does not necessarily substitute and crowd out others but may instead translate into spillover effects that benefit other market participants. Governance decisions by the platform owner play a key role in enabling and directing demand spillovers. In a bachelor thesis within this topic area, the student is expected to review extant literature related to platform governance and competition in platform markets, to analyze triggers and consequences of consumer demand spillovers and to identify promising avenues for future inquiries on platform ecosystems. André Halckenhäußer C: Data Value Assessment Data sharing and monetization provides organizations with new sources of revenue and value creation. Data has the potential to unlock new revenue streams while making businesses more profitable and more competitive. However, an accepted and scalable approach to data sharing and monetization is still lacking in practice. Research on data sharing is still in its infancy and lacks of insightful studies that go beyond identified challenges such as data management, privacy, and security hindering the monetization of data. Distributed-Ledger-Technology (DLT) has the potential to transform many industries by overcoming these challenges and facilitating a secure and scalable approach to data sharing and monetization. In this seminar thesis, the student is expected to conduct a structured literature review in order to elaborate and summarize different DLT-based data sharing solution approaches. Hereby the student should focus on relevant literature from the Computer Science, Data Science, and Information Systems fields. Timo Himmelsbach D: Agile Requirements Engineering in Large-Scale Enterprise Software Development Requirements engineering is still one of the crucial tasks for software development. Following Pohl (2010), it encompasses the elicitation, validation, and documentation of desired properties and necessary constraints of a software, as well as the frequent validation and continuous management of the same. Especially in enterprise software development, features of a new software under development must be derived from the software vendor with the help of experts and knowledge stakeholders from industry during the elicitation phase. However, constantly changing requirements of the multiple stakeholders, especially in large-scale enterprise software development, makes requirements engineering challenging. Therefore, agile requirements engineering methods have been proposed by research and practice to address this requirements volatility. The aim of this Bachelor’s thesis should be to understand the research field of agile requirements engineering and to conduct a structured literature review about the recent research especially addressing large scale enterprise software in this field. Phillip Hoffmann E: Data-Driven Behavior Change, Resilience, (mHealth) Apps Recent crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic have offered another convincing example of how negative their impact on individuals is. Such crises can result in long-lasting elevated levels of stress, poorer health, and reduced well-being. Crises are omnipresent, from fleeing one’s home country due to war, heat waves and water shortage due to climate change, political disruptions, or financial crises. At the same time our world is becoming increasingly complex and characterized by digital phenomena and there is a prevalence of IT in our lives. The ubiquitous availability of individualized digital devices (smartphones, smartwatches, laptops, etc.) offers novel opportunities for influencing and changing human behavior. Resilience (the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands) is the concept that enables people to overcome the negative consequences of crises. It has been demonstrated that the resources and skills associated with resilience can be cultivated, learned, and strengthened through practices and interventions. This bachelor thesis investigates the question whether and how technology can be applied to foster individuals' resilience. In a structured literature review the student is expected to 1) identify which technologies can be leveraged to strengthen the resilience of individuals, 2) summarize which prerequisites are needed to apply these technologies, and 3) discuss the underlying (theoretical) mechanisms through which these technologies are effectively enhancing individuals' resilience. For a definition of resilience see: Fletcher, D., & Sarkar, M. (2013). Psychological Resilience: A Review and Critique of Definitions, Concepts, and Theory. European Psychologist, 18(1), 12–23. https://doi.org/10.1027/1016–9040/a000124 Mechthild Pieper F: Computational Creative Systems, Generative Artificial Intelligence, Creative Cognition Computational creative systems (CCS) are Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based systems with own creative capabilities. When humans collaborate with such systems, they share agency during their joint creative processing, creating a rather novel unit of analysis, that is a human-AI dyad. We conducted an inductive experimental study around human-AI creativity and collected data from 55 AI-assisted creativity session. In this Bachelor thesis, you will get access to the collected data and analyze it to eventually identify patterns in the interaction of the human with the CCS. The research question is: „How do dyadic human-AI collaborations influence creative cognition?“ Deborah Mateja G: Development and Use of Machine Learning in Organizations Auditing and Altering of Machine Learning Systems in Organizations Machine Learning (ML) systems can learn to provide highly accurate predictions and recommend suitable paths of action by extracting patterns from diverse data. Organizations apply ML systems to augment decision making and fully or partially automate tasks. However, the resulting ML systems are often not transparent in their reasoning process and, in many cases, continue to learn based on new data over time. To ensure that such ML systems do not produce incorrect or biased results, it is necessary to constantly audit and alter them (e.g., Grønsund & Aanestad, 2020). Recent literature has discussed auditing and altering of ML systems from different perspectives, using different terms, and providing different organizational examples. In your thesis, you will review the findings from Information Systems, Organizational, and Management Research to synthesize what is currently known about auditing and altering of ML systems and identify important gaps for future research. Pascal Kunz H: AI in Healthcare AI systems have achieved revolutionary advances in radiologic tasks such as diagnosis, risk prediction, and treatment. Consequently, medical AI research has flourished in disciplines that rely on the interpretation of medical images. However, the “black box nature” of Deep Learning is critical in healthcare and has accelerated scientific interest in the development of eXplainable AI (XAI) to provide explanations for AI-based decisions. A major factor in the effectiveness and helpfulness of XAI is the way explanations are communicated to human users through, for instance, scores, textual explanations, or saliency maps that highlight important regions of an image. Therefore, a bachelor thesis in this context may conduct a structured literature review to provide an overview of XAI methods that address radiologic image analytics, for instance, lung nodule detection, along with theoretical properties and practical examples. Luis Oberste I: ‘Make vs. Buy’ Decisions for AI The ongoing proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) promises new sources of value creation for businesses. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that 70% of companies worldwide will use at least one type of AI by 2030. As such, major cloud service providers (Microsoft, IBM, Google, SAP, etc.) have begun offering general AI solutions to the market. Startups and small to mid-sized companies are entering niche segments with highly specialized AI solutions. To avoid being left behind by the market, companies in all industries must find ways to effectively access AI capabilities – either by developing respective capabilities in-house or by buying them in from the market. The structured literature review of this bachelor thesis aims to examine what and how the special characteristics of AI change the Information Systems (IS) sourcing decision. Good starting points: Berente et al., 2021 – Managing Artificial Intelligence Lacity et al. 2017 – Review of 23 Years of Research on IT Outsourcing Decisions and Outcomes Tobias Maier J: Human-Computer Interaction Systems based on artificial intelligence (AI) can collaborate with humans on a variety of different tasks. A growing body of literature focuses on how individuals perceive and evaluate AI advice. Nevertheless, many tasks in practice are team-based. Research is only starting to acknowledge team-AI collaboration. Therefore, very little is known about the underlying mechanisms of team-AI collaboration. Specifically, the emotional responses of human team members to the participation of an AI team member have important implications for a successful and sustainable collaboration between a team of humans and an AI system. For this bachelor thesis, the student should conduct a structured literature review to provide an overview of existing literature on the effect of AI participation on humans´ emotional reactions. Moreover, the student is expected to discuss how these findings apply to team-AI collaboration. Introductory literature: You, S., & Robert, L. (2017). Emotional attachment, performance, and viability in teams collaborating with embodied physical action (EPA) robots. You, S. and Robert, LP (2018). Emotional Attachment, Performance, and Viability in Teams Collaborating with Embodied Physical Action (EPA) Robots, Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 19(5), 377–407 Désirée Zercher K: Human-AI Interaction Theory of mind refers to the ability to understand and attribute mental states, such as beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions to others in order to predict and explain behavior. In the context of interacting with AI, users may attribute mental states to the AI, such as beliefs or intentions, in order to make sense of its behavior. However, unlike human beings, AI does not actually have beliefs or emotions, but rather operates on a set of programmed rules and algorithms. Literature on mind perception argues that mind perception occurs on two dimensions, namely agency and experience (Gray et al. 2007). With regard to agency, users of AI may assume that the AI has the ability to act intentionally to achieve goals, similar to how humans do. This may lead to a sense of agency being attributed to the AI. With regard to experience, users of generative AI may assume that the AI has the ability to perceive and respond to emotions. This may lead to a sense of experience being attributed to the AI. This bachelor thesis is supposed to conduct a systematic literature review to investigate how agency and experience have been stimulated through anthropomorphic AI design and to report how such designs influence user perception and behavior. Ideally, this literature analysis will illustrate different antecedents and consequences of the two dimensions of mind perceptions. Gray, H. M., Gray, K., and Wegner, D. M. 2007. “Dimensions of Mind Perception,” science (315:5812), pp. 619–619 (doi: 10.1126/science.1134475). Dr. Anna-Maria Seeger L: Human-Computer-Interaction Avatars are digital representations of people that are used in virtual environments such as online games, virtual reality experiences, or e-commerce. Previous research has shown that beautified avatars, with an optimised appearance can provide motivation and inspiration for users to work towards their goals and improve themselves. However, beautifying a user's avatar, or creating an avatar that represents an idealised version of the user, can also have severe negative consequences. It can lead to body dissatisfaction and negative self-image in the user. When the user sees their avatar as more attractive or idealised than their actual appearance, it can create a discrepancy between their digital self and their actual self, leading to negative emotions and self-esteem issues. Additionally, it may also lead to unrealistic expectations and disappointment in the user's real-life interactions and relationships. In some cases, it may even lead to gaming addiction or other forms of excessive technology use. In order to understand how avatars can be designed effectively and responsibly, it is important to understand what digital responsibility for the creation of avatars could look like. For this seminar paper the student is expected to conduct a structured literature review to identify how (digital) responsibility was captured and conceptualised in previous studies. In addition, the student is expected to outline which theoretical perspectives have been used by previous studies to understand the relationship between (un-)ethical design of technology and negative psychological consequences for an individual. Rosa Holtzwart Literature
- The literature review should be done by students independently
- The review should include electronic literature sources offered by the University of Mannheim (Rechercheportal) as well as sources available on the internet
- Overviews of literature sources are available at the Mannheim University Library
