ORNEC Projects > ORNEC Research Projects - Business Cluster

Identity Theft (ID Theft) Research Projects

Identity theft is the term that is used broadly to include for example illegal acts (e.g. through phishing and spyware) of credit card fraud, on-line banking fraud, passport fraud. Aided by the increase in digitization and online use of information, identity theft is rapidly becoming a major worldwide problem for businesses, governments, and citizens.

An effective response to this burgeoning problem requires a multi-tiered approach: in addition to technological tools, smart business practices, and improved consumer awareness, government policy and legislative reform have key roles to play. Under the ID Theft Category, four research projects have been funded and supported by generous contributions from the following private sector partners:

ORNEC ID Theft Private Sector Partners:

CIBC: Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce
RBC Financial Group: Royal Bank of Canada
BMO Financial Group: Bank of Montreal
TD Bank Financial Group: Toronto Dominion Bank
CITO: Communications and Information Technology Ontario (Member of the OCE)
Bell Canada BSSI

1- Defining and Measuring Identity Theft in Canada

Principal Investigator:

Dr. Norm Archer, Professor Emeritus, DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University

Co-Investigators:

Dr. Ken Deal, Associate Professor and Area Chair, Marketing, Business Policy, and International Business
DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University

Dr. Yolande Chan, Professor, School of Business, Queen’s University

Dr. Vinod Kumar, Professor, Eric Sprott School of Business, Carleton University

Dr. Uma Kumar, Professor, Eric Sprott School of Business, Carleton University

Start and End Dates:

January 01, 2006 – December 15, 2007

Summary

Determine the appropriate categories for identity theft and related identity fraud that are most suitable for monitoring and evaluating identity theft for both consumers and businesses. Ensure that these measures are equivalent to, or can be mapped into, international measures for the purpose of international comparisons.

Find and evaluate the various sources of identity theft and fraud-related data for consistency, accuracy, and completeness, and categorize these sources.

Develop sound measures of identity theft and fraud in each of the categories identified above, that can be used to measure the extent and cost of different types of identity theft.

Develop current estimates of identity theft and fraud, based on these measures, including estimates of their statistical accuracy. National surveys of consumers, and case studies and surveys of businesses in selected sectors will support the accomplishment of these objectives.

Develop a framework to examine the adequacy of corporate information access policies and the ability of corporations to prevent, detect, and report unlawful access to personal information of customers and employees. Include measures of the use of audit trails for ID theft and fraud detection purposes. Document the economic and social costs of ID theft, including the repercussions of unlawful data access on company reputation, the strength of social and market ties with customers, and financial performance. Determine whether legislative enhancements are necessary to strengthen defenses against ID theft and fraud.

Establish an estimate of the impact of identity theft and fraud on business, government, the national economy, and on Canadian society, both in monetary and social terms.

Develop an index of identity theft and fraud that can be used to monitor progress over time in terms of changes in the level and impact of these activities on the nation

2- Management Approaches to Combating ID Theft

Principle Investigator:

Dr. Yufei Yuan, Professor, DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University

Wayne C. Fox Chair in Business Innovations, DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University

Co-investigators:

Dr. Khaled Hassanein, Associate Professor, director MeRC, MeRC/DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University

Dr. Milena Head, Associate Professor, Associate Dean Academic, MeRC/DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University

Dr. Vinod Kumar, Professor, Business School Director, Sprott School of Business, Carleton University

Dr. Uma Kumar, Professor, Sprott School of Business, Carleton University

Dr. Shaobo Ji, Assistant Professor, Sprott School of Business, Carleton University

Start and End Dates:

January 01, 2006 – December 15, 2007

Summary

The main objective of this project is to develop an effective management approach to combating identity theft. Specifically to:

Develop a carefully designed and generalizable institutional approach to ID theft risk analysis,

Investigate the current status and effectiveness of tools, techniques and practices to prevent and address identity theft and to identify and analyze the costs and benefits of countermeasures to ID theft,

Understand consumer acceptance of various countermeasures to ID theft across various applications,

Study the effectiveness of various approaches to multi-party coordination in combating ID theft,

Study the interrelationship and interaction between security, privacy, trust, and ID theft prevention.

3- Technical Tools to Address the ID Theft Problem

Principal Investigator:

Dr. Ali Miri, Associate Professor, School of Information Technology and Engineering, University of Ottawa

Co-investigators:

Dr. Carlisle Adams, School of Information Technology and Engineering, University of Ottawa

Dr. Andrew Adler, School of Information Technology and Engineering, University of Ottawa

Dr. Abdulmotaleb El Saddik, School of Information Technology and Engineering, University of Ottawa

Dr. Liam Peyton, School of Information Technology and Engineering, University of Ottawa

Dr. Thomas Tran, School of Information Technology and Engineering, University of Ottawa

Dr. Paul van Oorschot , Canada Research Chair, School of Computer Science, Carleton University

Start and End Dates:

January 01, 2006 – December 15, 2007

Summary

This proposal defines an advanced research program, using the ORNEC and CITO network of researchers, on technological aspects of the ID Theft problem. The proposal combines work in IT with research in management science and human decision making. Specifically we propose to work on:

Biometrics – who will manage the biometric information? What will be the access rights? Can we use DRM solutions in a biometric setting?

Digital credentials – credential owners decide which part of their identity is revealed in their transactions. This decreases the public information and reduces the risk of ID theft

Trust management - how can a reputed management system establish trustworthiness of goods and services providers?

Legal compliance enforcement – how can an information transfer registry enforce privacy compliance?

Profiling – how can we monitor business activities to detect anomalies in ‘regular’ behavior of individuals, as diverging from their normal profile?

4- Legal and Policy Approaches to Identity Theft

Principal Investigator:

Philippa Lawson, Executive Director, Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, Faculty of Law (Common Law), University of Ottawa

Co-Investigators:

Dr. Robert Biddle, Professor, Human Oriented Technology Laboratory, Department of Psychology, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Carleton University

Professor Jennifer Chandler, Faculty of Law (Common law), University of Ottawa

Dr. Daniel Gervais, Faculty of Law (Common law), University of Ottawa

Dr. Elizabeth Judge, Faculty of Law (Common law), University of Ottawa

Professor Valerie Steeves, Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa

Start and End Dates:

January 01, 2006 – December 15, 2007

Summary

To develop well-informed and well-reasoned recommendations for industry self-regulation, government policy, and legislative reform aimed at preventing, detecting and mitigating the effects of ID theft, by:

Identifying techniques typically used by ID thieves, as well as corporate and government information management practices that facilitate ID theft (in consultation with parallel project on management practices);

Identifying factors in e-commerce systems that influence consumer trust and ability to assess risk of ID theft, and that inhibit consumers from taking precautions that would better prevent ID theft;

Identifying and evaluating different legislative and government policy approaches to preventing, detecting, and mitigating the effects of ID theft;

Examining the privacy implications of corporate practices and proposed legislative approaches to ID theft;

analysing existing legal avenues for individuals and other victims of ID theft to pursue civil redress for ID theft/fraud under common law tort and property doctrines, as well as the civil law doctrine of personality rights;

Analysing the extent to which the law permits corporate and individual victims of ID theft to fight back through extra-legal self-help methods such as denial of service attacks; and

Identifying the privacy and ethical impacts of proposed technological, business management, and market approaches to combating and mitigating the effects of ID theft.

To develop guidelines for e-commerce system managers and online consumers so as to encourage vigilant corporate and consumer behaviour that reduces the risk of ID theft;

To work with colleagues in other projects and in the private sector on resolving legal and privacy issues arising in the context of initiatives to prevent and detect ID theft; and

To develop the groundwork for a network of provincial or regional ID theft victim assistance clinics (or a national clinic), to which public and private sector agencies can refer individuals for advice and assistance.

eHealth Research Projects

1- Health Care Case Transformation Project

Principal Investigator:

Dr. Norm Archer, Professor Emeritus, DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University

Private Sector Partners

Saint Elizabeth Health Care

Start and End Dates

May 16, 2005 – September 03, 2005 (Completed)

Summary

It is recognized that effective home health care requires an integrated management approach along with continuously accessible bundled resources. This is essential to satisfy the following main objectives:

Developing and continuously updating treatment plans

Identification of immediate medical emergencies

Correct referrals

Work ups

In comparison to current non-integrated approaches, this will result in improved compliance and problem solving, better patient outcomes and generally better care and significantly improved cost efficiencies.

This project investigated a unique integrated bundled services model for home health care. Results of this research will impact redesign of home health business processes.

2- Simcoe County Mobile eHealth Project (Phases 1 and 2)

Principal Investigator:

Dr. Norm Archer, Professor Emeritus, DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University

Co-Investigators:

Dr. K. Sartipi (Computing at McMaster)

Dr. S. Strauss (CRC Chair, Medicine, Toronto)

Private Sector Partners

Allegro Wireless

Bayshore Home Health

Start and End Dates:

Phase 1: June 01, 2005 – January 31, 2006 (Completed)
Phase 2: February 01, 2006 – May 31, 2006 (Completed)

Summary

The main purpose has been to investigate the use of mobile technology to support home healthcare applications. Research work in Phase 1 (completed in January 2006), has shown the following:

Business Case Analysis to assess gains from wireless in eHealth showed that homecare nurses spend over 50% of their time communicating, filling forms, retrieving data and faxing information.

Business Process Maps generated for potential applications showed that revised business processes with hand-held wireless devices promise large gains in simplification and time savings.

Fundamental characteristics of usability and technology acceptance evaluated through two prototype applications (ordering of medical supplies and wound care management) have shown good acceptance.

To continue to investigate the use of mobile technology in supporting home healthcare applications building on results of Phase 1, the following are the objectives targeted in Phase 2:

Design and Setup of a wireless infrastructure prototype using wireless networking solutions securely linked to end user mobile devices through the cell phone network. Applications will run on a secure central server linked to CCACSC (Community Care Access Centre Simcoe County) database. Privacy and security issues will be addressed

Prototype development of a “Scheduling Module” to achieve considerable savings in the time of homecare nurses in getting their schedules. At present time schedules are transmitted to homecare nurses through considerable manual interaction using phone and fax

Implementation and testing in real homecare environment involving over 100 Bayshore homecare nurses.

Business case analysis to estimate financial benefits

The wireless infrastructure completed during Phase 2 work will continue to support research work investigating the use of wireless technology to increase the quality and reduce the cost of delivering home health care.

3- Evolving eHealth Business Processes Around Accessible Data Warehouses

Principal Investigator:

Dr. Daniel Amyot , Assistant Professor, School of Information Technology and Engineering (SITE), University of Ottawa

Co-Investigators:

Dr. Michael Weiss, Assistant Professor, SCS, Carleton University

Dr. Liam Peyton, Senior Associate Architect, Cognos Inc., Assistant Professor (on leave), School of Information Technology and Engineering (SITE), University of Ottawa

Dr. Alan Foster, Scientist, Clinical Epidemiology, Ottawa Health Research Institute, Assistant Professor, Department of Medicine, University of Ottawa

Dr. Douglas E. Angus, Professor, School of Management, University of Ottawa, Director, Ph.D. Program in Population Health, University of Ottawa

Private Sector Partners

Telelogic North America Inc.

Cognos Inc.

Sybase Canada Inc.

Start and End Dates:
January 01, 2006 – December 15, 2007

Summary

This project studies how to improve and evolve healthcare processes to take advantage of new e-technologies. Our study will take as an example The Ottawa Hospital (TOH), a multi-campus organization with 10,000 employees that provides consolidated care across the city. Resulting from the merger of several hospitals in 1998, it is moving towards a single on-line clinical data repository available across the institution. In 2001, a large data warehouse (DW) project was initiated in order to improve the effectiveness, efficiency, and equity of healthcare, to facilitate innovations in healthcare delivery, and to improve the health of the population in general. The DW infrastructure is intended to support research on health and health services, and to support clinical and administrative decision making. The complexity and size of this DW reflect the importance of the TOH in the region, the complexity of that business, and the opportunities for useful health research: on its busiest days, the TOH receives nearly 8000 visitors and delivers over 30,000 tests.

The DW has currently completed its load of historical data (since 1996) and is receiving weekly incremental loads from seven different sources. The DW contains about a thousand fields describing patients and records, encounters, labs and reports, ER tracking, census, facility capacity, staffing information, etc. Several cycles of data validation and auditing have already been completed, and the DW is now deemed to be usable.

The DW will be used by researchers only until mid-2006. One important issue identified by TOH is to make it more accessible and used by various stakeholders, from doctors, nurses, administrators, and researchers, to patients and to other people outside TOH (e.g., clinics, other hospitals and researchers, and home care professionals).

New requirements will emerge when such people start using the DW. Our goals in that context hence include:

G1: Process improvement to take advantage of e-technologies such as data warehouses

G2: Having good methodologies to describe, analyze, evolve, manage, support, and automate DW-oriented, e-health processes.

G3: Promoting the access to the DW and managing changes.

All of these goals need to take into consideration critical domain constraints such as privacy, confidentiality, quality, and consent, as well as heavy legacy (and often manual) processes and regulatory environments.

This combination of complementary approaches is novel and builds on recent developments in requirements engineering, decision support, business process modeling, and business intelligence. How to combine, tailor, exploit and extend the existing tools and techniques represents an important research challenge. This research is much needed in a provincial healthcare sector where business processes are continuously renewed and changing. It is also timely as the healthcare sector recently benefited from large investments in IT infrastructures and must now seize the opportunity to evolve its processes around them.

As an example, Canadian research has demonstrated that 1 in 10 patients treated in teaching hospitals will experience a complication caused by their treatment. One-third of these so-called adverse events are due to preventable errors that staggeringly raise the cost of caring for patients while worsening their well-being. One obstacle to preventing complications is systematically measuring them, and this is not well supported by processes in place. Goals and priorities are difficult to identify. However, some routinely collected hospital data can be used to infer several complications (e.g., prescriptions of naloxone ==> morphine overdose). A DW can help discovering, validating, and tracking complication triggers, leading to better processes for their identification and measurement, and to the design of effective interventions.

This research project offers a rich and stimulating learning environment for many graduate students, in a collaborative multidisciplinary context. In addition, we expect the expertise and the experience developed to be transferable to our industrial research partners.

4- Supporting E-Learning through 3D Collaborative Virtual Environments for the Radiotherapy and Cancer Care Teaching Application

Principal Investigator:

Dr. Azzedine Boukerche, Professor and Canada Research Chair, School of Information Technology and Engineering (SITE), University of Ottawa

Co-Investigators:

Dr. L. Grimard, Department of Radiology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Ottawa

Dr. A. Saudi, Department of Radiology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Ottawa

Dr. M. Benyoucef, Department of Administration, Scholl of Management, University of Ottawa

Private Sector Partners

IBM Canada

Start and End Dates:
January 01, 2006 – December 15, 2007

Summary

New and enhanced technologies have been introduced for cancer diagnosis such as, multi modality imaging platform that provide tumor precise and accurate anatomical localization with CT (Computed Tomography) fused with molecular signature of the tumor using PET (Positron Emission Tomography) integrated in the same scanner. Also, new technologies for precise and accurate image based tumor targeting have emerged with IMRT (Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy) treatment delivery capability integrated in one machine TOMOTHERAPY (a new technology recently installed and being used at The Ottawa Hospital). With the increase of complex and highly demanding environment, we are witnessing an increasing number of requests from radiotherapy departments and cancer treatment clinics to train, teach and keep up-to-date their medical personnel with the latest and newly introduced techniques. Collaborative 3D simulations supporting web-based eLearning courses can provide a virtual training environment where objects can be manipulated and ideas and experiences can be shared among participants (doctors, nurses, technologists and students) using text and voice. Here is a summary of the main objectives:

Development of a reliable web-based architecture that can run and support 3D collaborative virtual environments (3DCVE) as interactive non-linear stories to be integrated into e-learning applications based environment;

Design of an XML based virtual environment language (X-VEML) that describes 3DCVEs as nonlinear stories and allow non-programmers to create large-scale collaborative 3D virtual simulations on the web;

Development of a 3DCVEs authoring tool that can create collaborative 3D virtual simulations as non-linear stories;

Development of a 3DCVEs recording and playing tool that can record participant users’ experience in a collaborative 3D virtual simulation for real-time and non-real time 3D visualization and users’ knowledge evaluation purposes;

Development of an e-learning course and stories based collaborative 3D virtual simulation, to be used as a case study for promoting web-based collaboration among health-care professionals for teaching and treatment diagnosis purposes (e.g., radiotherapy for cancer treatment);

Investigate and extend the proposed 3DCVE model to allow interaction among participants through voice over IP (VoIP) communication channel.

5- Remote Patient Monitoring Using Pressure Sensitive Mats

Principal Investigator:

Dr. Rafik Goubran, Director, Ottawa Carleton Institute for Biomedical Engineering, Professor and Department Chair, Department of Systems and Computer Engineering, Carleton University

Co-Investigators:

Dr. Frank Knoefel, Chief of Staff, SCO Health Service, Associate Professor, Family Medicine, University of Ottawa

Dr. Samy Mahmoud, Dean of Engineering and Design, Carleton University

Private Sector Partners

Tactex Controls Inc.

Nortel Networks

Start and End Dates:
April 01, 2006 – December 15, 2007

Summary

Delivering better quality health care at less cost to elderly patients in long-term care and rehabilitation facilities and in their own homes is possible by making their homes smarter through emerging eHealth applications employing a multitude of sensors. These systems can monitor the health and well being of the home occupant though motion detection, temperature, smells and many other functions around the home and raise the appropriate alarm when necessary.

An interesting new technology is emerging to allow non-intrusive monitoring of elderly patients when they sit in their favorite place to read or watch television and when they go to bed (a time when they are most vulnerable), for example monitoring of sleeping patterns, bed/sofa exit/entry routines and breathing rates. This new technology employs “pressure-sensitive” mats that can be placed on a bed or a sofa. A pressure sensitive mat includes an array of optical fiber sensors that can detect the pressure at each pixel leading to a “low-resolution video” of the posture of the person lying on the mat and which is transmitted as a digital signal to a monitoring station where it is analyzed in real-time using advanced signal processing techniques to detect abnormal behavior and alert nursing staff.

The project investigates the feasibility of delivering a better and more cost effective health service using e-health techniques. Therefore the project’s research focus is on the improvement of patient care through remote patient monitoring, and the effective analysis of the data produced by the various existing sensor types. It investigates the different electronic processes, advanced communication systems, and new design approaches aiming to support healthcare delivery through this new e-health application. From a technical perspective it assesses the processing needs, processing approach (e.g. local versus remote processing), communications needs (bandwidth requirements, wired versus wireless transmission, response time, communications platform). From a social perspective, the program considers the important e-health related question of the impact of 24/7 remote monitoring techniques on the privacy and security of the patient. The project also analyzes the performance and limitations of the proposed concept and determines its technical requirements and any possible technical challenges and limitations. From a medical perspective, the project identifies possible medical conditions that could be detected using the proposed concept.

6- Intelligent Dental Lesions Early Detection and Severity Analysis System (IDLEDSAS)

Principal Investigator:

Dr. Wail Gueaieb, Assistant Professor, School of Information Technology and Engineering (SITE), University of Ottawa

Co-Investigators:

Dr. Elkafi. Hassini, Assistant Professor, Michael DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University

Private Sector Partners

Riverside Dental

IBM Canada

Start and End Dates:
April 01, 2006 – December 15, 2007

Summary

Despite significant advances in preventing and curing dental decays, dental care still is a major health problem to millions around the globe. Over 75% of world population suffers from dental lesions by the age of 17. Dental lesions also affect elderly patients (according to Statistics Canada, the percentage of Canadians over 65 years of age exceeds 20%). Early diagnosis remains by far the most effective way of curing diseases and abnormalities affecting the human body and early detection of dental lesions will decrease the chance of further complications and surgical interventions and reduce the cost of treatment.

The main purpose of this research project is to develop an intelligent fully automated dental lesions early detection and severity analysis system (IDLEDSAS) to detect early symptoms of dental lesions and analyze their severity levels.

Research studies have shown that at an early stage, the symptoms of dental lesions are in most cases too difficult to detect due to the visual limitations of the human eye. IDLEDSAS will employ emerging soft computing techniques to develop state-of-the-art software pattern recognition algorithms that can analyze dental radiographs at the pixel level and capture signs of dental lesions even in their early stage of development.

Soft computing techniques, such as swarm intelligence, fuzzy logic, and artificial neural networks constitute a consortium of methodologies that work synergistically to provide flexible information processing capabilities for dealing with real-life ambiguous situations. They are very well credited for their high tolerance for imprecision, uncertainty, approximate reasoning, and partial truth in order to achieve tractability, robustness, low cost solutions, and close resemblance to human-like decision making. These qualities make of soft computing an ideal candidate to form the driving engine of future generation intelligent systems/machines.

7- Psychologist in the Box: A Novel Approach to Providing Adaptive Interactive eHealth Services to Clients with Eating Disorders

Principal Investigator:

Dr. Gitte Lindgaard, Professor and NSERC/Cognos Industry Chair in User-Oriented Product Design, Department of Psychology, Carleton University

Private Sector Partners

S4Potential Corporation

Start and End Dates:
May 01, 2006 – December 15, 2007

Summary

In the behavioral healthcare domain, clinical practitioners spend a lot of their time helping clients to learn a range of social and coping skills to help them overcome their problems. In North America, face-to-face therapy is a huge market that is estimated to be $104 billion US in direct and indirect mental healthcare spending per year.

In order to expand this practice, retain its effectiveness while reducing its costs it is widely recognized that one can turn to eTherapy computer-based systems. However current systems are not capable of gleaning relevant information about the client’s personality, preferences and severity of his/her condition in an unobtrusive, conversational and dynamic fashion. Further more, current systems are not capable of adapting their assessments procedures with client during eTherapy sessions.

To overcome short-comings of current eTherapy computer-based systems, “Psychologist in the Box” is being developed as an interactive and adaptive expert system. With the help of S4Potential’s “Hub and Spoke” software architecture, a prototype expert system is being designed. The “Hub” will house administrative functions (independent of the eTherapy topic). A specific “Spoke” will be designed to support the particular “Eating Disorders eTherapy” topic the subject of this work. The prototype is expandable to address other eTherapy topics by adding additional “Spokes”.

8- Developing a Conceptual Framework for a Medical Error Management System

Principal Investigator:

Dr. Avi Parush, Associate Professor, HOT Lab, Department of Psychology, Carleton University

Co-Investigators:

Dr. Kathy Momtahan, Clinical Research Scientist, Ottawa Heart Institute and Adjunct Professor at the School of Nursing, University of Ottawa

Private Sector Partners

Amita Corporation

Start and End Dates:
August 15, 2006 – December 15, 2007

Summary

Poor patient safety is also extremely costly, in human life and monetary terms, for the individual, the hospital, and the medical support system, both provincial and federal. This drives the need to:

Develop and implement effective strategies to prevent and minimize adverse events in the healthcare system (The Canadian Healthcare Association report, November, 2002),

Conduct research that seeks to understand adverse events, their causes and potential solutions (in the strategic plan of the Canadian Institute for Patient Safety, published in 2004),

Create organizational and policy level supports for patient safety efforts (in a report submitted to Health Canada, Baker & Norton, 2002).

Among the various strategies and solutions that have been suggested, there is one specific need that stands out in most reports and publications: The need for non-punitive medical error tracking, documentation, analysis, identification, definition, in order to establish guidelines, procedures, information technology, track changes and improvements, and to be a basis for safety-oriented education and training.

Using a user-centered research approach, this project aims to undertake in-depth research into the concept of the OR Smart Black Box (inspired by the aviation "black box", flight data recorder), which may exist locally, or remotely from the OR, connected by some existing e-health network. This will be a concept for a system to capture mishaps, adverse events, and near-misses in order to document and investigate medical errors, and based on that, to develop guidelines, procedures and information technology solutions to minimize such mishaps. This is critical to developing an appropriate patient safety management program. In addition, it can be used for training, research, and remote consultation/collaboration (tele-medicine), in real time or as playback.

Experiences in other sectors such as aviation demonstrates the value of systematic approaches in recording and reporting adverse events and the merits of analyzing information on the ‘near misses’ as well as full accidents with fatal and costly outcomes. Therefore in this project research will focus on exploring and developing the concept of a system that will be beyond a basic recording and reporting system. The objective is to develop a concept for a system that will support the management of medical errors with respect to risk and safety.

The proposed project has two objectives:

Survey and identify within current practices the basic information (e.g., patient vital signs, personnel communication, etc.) that needs to be continuously captured and documented and that would enable the identification and analysis of medical accidents and near-misses.

Develop and evaluate a preliminary conceptual framework for a system that will capture, store, and enable interactive debriefing and analysis of medical events. Both objectives follow the basic approaches of user-centered research and design. This approach includes user needs analysis (performed by task analysis techniques), concept design based on those needs, and user evaluations.

The research program will consist of four main stages:

Task analysis and survey: Analysis of the activities in the operating room, with particular focus on the information technology aspects that need to be captured.

Requirements generation: Development of the functional and human interaction requirements of the proposed solution.

Conceptual framework development: Development of a conceptual framework of the medical error management system.

Preliminary evaluation (Proof of concept): The last stage of evaluation and validation will aim to validate the feasibility of the concept. Medical personnel will observe the demonstration and provide feedback based on both structured questionnaires and informal interviews.

9- RFID-Based Wireless Networks for Ubiquitous Real-Time Object Tracking

Principal Investigator:

Dr. Rafael Kleiman, Professor and Canada Research Chair in MEMS, Department of Engineering Physics, McMaster University
Dr. Khaled Hassanein, Associate Professor of Information Systems and Director of MeRC, Michael DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University

Private Sector Partners

Hamilton Health Sciences

Start and End Dates

January 01, 2006 – April 30, 2007

Summary

RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology has been in service for several years initially in military applications and later in civilian applications like high way toll systems. Advances in technology and component packaging have resulted in enhanced capabilities and much lower cost and hence increased use to support more and more applications like object tracking in supply chain management systems.

The large amounts of information current RFID systems are able to collect poses new challenges for traditional warehouse solutions and expose limitations of software applications. These challenges are addressed in this research.

eLearning Research Projects

1- End-User Scripting for On-line Immersive Training

Principal Investigator:

Dr. Robert Biddle, Professor, Human-Oriented Technology Lab, Department of Psychology, Carleton University

Co-Investigators:

Dr. Brian Greenspan, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Carleton University

Private Sector Partners

I2 Learning

Start and End Dates:

April 17, 2006 – December 15, 2007

Summary

Video games acquired wide spread use due to their ability to provide a 3D Environment with a rich virtual reality spatial experience. Such experience is quite difficult to reproduce using simpler textual and multimedia systems. Video games inherently stimulate end user participation where authoring systems are common and are used by the game industry to encourage participation and extension of the game platforms. Many organizations such as the military, airlines and Nuclear power plants are using video games-like training programs (simulators) to educate and train their employees. Likewise many video games derived their concepts from these training programs.

Some game platforms have been adapted and used for education purposes for example the Neverwinter Nights “Aurora Toolset” developed by the Canadian Company Bioware has been used at MIT for their educational role-play game “American Revolution” and also by Dr. Biddle at Carleton in his work on engaging educational games addressing environmental issues. In-depth experience with such tools using “Cognitive Dimensions” has revealed that although these tools support creation of the immersive setting very well, they are very poor in creating the interactive narrative.

The research in this project focuses on study of current end-user scripting systems (e.g. spread sheet methods) and on developing a new scripting system that leverages the narrative nature of scripting along with the easy end-user learning ability of a visual scripting language enriched with the new capabilities enabled by potential rich interactive web applications. This research is supported by the new and innovative technology from I2 Learning that leverages ideas from video games to create immersive virtual environments with interactive training scenarios involving the system and the user being trained. Besides training, this technology from I2 Learning also allows certification to be delivered on the web.

This research work coupled with support from I2 Learning will lead to developing technology to enable industrial organizations to easily create their own content for on-line training and certification.

eRetailling research Projects

1- Car Internet Research Program (CIRP-1)

Principal Investigator:

Dr. Christian Navarre, Associate Professor, School of Management, University of Ottawa

Private Sector Partners

ACUNIA Ernest & Young, Cap Gemini, PSA Peugeot Citroën, Renault-Nissan, Fujitsu Consulting and Plastic Omnium

Start and End Dates:

January 01, 2003 – November 30, 2004 (Completed)

Summary

The objective of this research was to study the current use of the Internet and its impact on automotive dealers in Canada and the US through surveys involving a large number of automotive dealers. The Internet allowed automotive buyers to access significant information of different types of car brands and models (specifications and pricing) and to compare and study from the comfort of their own homes and before visiting automotive dealerships. The results are discriminating car buyers, well informed, less likely to trust the traditional sales person and more inclined to negotiate. The Internet is rapidly changing the business model of automotive dealerships and those who are willing to evolve and exploit rather than being threatened by this new phenomena will have a splendid opportunity to remain competitive and to secure continued growth.

2- Achieving Service Delivery Excellence

Principal Investigator:

Dr. Patricia Wakefield, Professor, DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University

Co-Investigators:

Dr. Devashish Pujari, Associate Professor, eGroote School of Business, McMaster University

Private Sector Partners

Sears Canada

Start and End Dates:

August 01, 2005 – November 30, 2006

Summary

This research investigates the product repair services market and its customers in the context of Sears’ HomeCentral Repair Services, specifically major appliances and heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) repair services. Objectives are:

To develop an overall strategic framework and methodology for achieving excellence in service delivery that will have cross industry application and value.

To generate a knowledge base about the skills and requirements of repair service personnel for enhancing service quality, including customer service, and technical and functional quality.

To investigate the relationship between service orientation of repair services technicians and managers, employee commitment and satisfaction, and customer satisfaction and loyalty.

To examine the factors that lead to adoption of remote technology for service provision.

To create a knowledge base of customer profiles, detailing the needs, expectations and potential profitability of specific segments of repair services customers.

To create a baseline of knowledge about the repair services market (HVAC and major appliances), its size, key players and their service offerings and market share.

The research project consists of two modules: (1) Module 1: The Repair Services Market Place; and, (2) Module 2: The Repair Services Customers. Based on a review of the extant literature and interviews with the private sector partner, we developed a theoretical service delivery model that identifies the critical incidents in the repair service encounter, the antecedents and consequences of service quality, and the expected relationships between customer satisfaction, loyalty and profitability.

The key research questions for Module 1 are:

Does the level of complexity of the repair service determine the intensity of augmented service offerings?

Does the nature of the repair service and the corporate image affect the distribution strength and geographic coverage of the service provider?

Does the type of repair service (major appliances versus HVAC) affect the use of service line branding versus corporate branding?

The key research questions for Module 2 are:

How does the level of functional quality of the repair service influence customers’ intention to “buy” new repair services?

How can customers’ needs and expectations be used to determine the appropriate level of functional and technical service quality?

What are the differences in needs and expectations between service experiences with low technical intensity versus high technical intensity?

What factors affect the adoption of remote technology by technicians and what impact does the adoption of remote technology have on service performance?

Does the usage level (heavy versus low) as a function of demographic characteristics determine the expectation level, customer loyalty, and potential profitability?

A combination of research methods will be used to seek answers to the research questions and evaluate the theoretical model. These include: review of secondary data from published sources and company reports; in-depth interviews and/or surveys with repair services managers, technicians, call-centre employees, and customers; decomposition techniques to identify and model the factors leading to repair service demand; and, competitive analysis of service offerings, branding and positioning. Findings will assist in establishing benchmark performance metrics for aspects of service delivery such as, service orientation, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and service employee performance. These new insights into customer value should enable repair service providers to target specific customer segments with tailored service package offers, to track changes in segment characteristics, and to set measurable goals for each segment, contributing to growth, profitability and increased return on investment.

3- ROI: Return on Investment and Return on Involvement

Principal Investigator:

Dr. Tim Jones, Adjunct Professor, DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University

Co-Investigators:

Dr. Peggy Cunningham, Associate Professor, Queen’s University School of Business

Private Sector Partners

Canadian Magazine Publishers Association

Start and End Dates:

June 01, 2005 – May 31, 2007

Summary

The magazine industry in Canada is facing two serious challenges. The first like with most other advertising media, is the increasing demand from clients to justify the price for advertising space and the client need for concrete evidence of the magazine advertising ROI to advertisers. The second is the difficulty facing magazine publishers when they attempt to measure the value of its community of readers from the perspectives of subscription and purchase rates and the value of readers as a community to the advertising sector. The main research questions underlying this project therefore are:

What is the direct impact of magazine advertising on brand sales? and

What is the value of a magazine’s community of readers to its publisher and its community of advertisers? (i.e., is there a relationship effect?)

CMPA has identified reader involvement as a key variable in the magazine industry, and is looking to research which will uncover the nature, dimensionality, measurement drivers and outcomes of that involvement. Research in this area has been done in the past however reader involvement has not been sufficiently conceptualized and measured. Understanding the nature of this effect is urgent in today’s competitive environment, where Internet advertising has surged over 32% in 2004 and an additional 25% in 2005. Advertisers are being attracted to the Internet by what is thought to be the effect of the interactive nature of online advertising (display, search, and classified). Although Internet advertising is still only 4% of all advertising (versus approximately 25% for TV, for example), the rapid growth in Internet advertising will have a significant impact on spending in other media, since total advertising budgets are relatively stable. Internet advertising has demonstrated strengths in establishing one-to-one relationships with individuals and the user community, but there are corresponding parallels in the magazine industry. For example, in recent years there has been a rapid introduction of a wide variety of highly targeted magazines. As yet, however, there has been insufficient research into the effects of magazine reader involvement with these publications, making it difficult to understand the impact of this relationship.

While ongoing studies are planned, there is an immediate need to have some positive effects to be able to report to existing and potential advertisers, along with some reassurance that an investment in a much more comprehensive phase will yield something of value. Therefore, the project will begin with a pilot phase, to initially examine the relationship between specific media advertising expenditures and brand sales. This will include a comparison with other forms of media (e.g., television, radio, newspaper, outdoor, direct, promotions, and Internet), and whether magazine advertising enhances the effect of such other media on sales and market share.

4- Personalized Electronic Taylor

Principal Investigator:

Dr. WonSook Lee
Assistant Professor
School of Information Technology and Engineering (SITE), University of Ottawa

Co-Investigators:

Dr. Chris Joslin
Assistant Professor
School of Information Technology, Carleton University

Dr. Chang Shu
(i) Adjunt Professor, School of Computer Science, Carleton University
(ii) Research Officer, Institute for Information Technology, National Research Council

Marc Rioux
Research Officer
Institute for Information Technology, National Research Council

Private Sector Partners

XYZ RGB Inc.

Start and End Dates:

April 01, 2006 – December 15, 2007

Summary

Ordering clothes on line requires time and effort to make sure that the size is the best fit. Unfortunately it often happens that that the clothes that have been ordered and received do not really fit. This project aims to solve these problems by developing a more accurate interactive system for creating better personalized human models of customers for use in online garment shopping.

Through few simple steps involving taking few digital pictures of ones-self, a software program will stitch these pictures together to generate a digital 3-D image (Avatar) on one’s own computer. We propose to achieve the true 3D reflection of the customers by utilizing our know-how in computer graphics and vision techniques to create rapid personalized 3D body from a few images taken from different view points using a digital camera. The required rapid creation and visualization of personalized body can be initiated with a minimum of specific information and instructions that induce the automatic assembly of large volumes of statistical details from the CAESAR databases, so that the visualization can be credibly realized in high quality. It is important that the models should be created easily.

We need to address the following research problems: (i) Develop a new representation scheme (both compact and accurate) for specifying human body shapes replacing traditional measurements. (ii) Surface reconstruction from multiple images and investigation of the trade-offs between system robustness and user convenience. (iii) Unified new user interface investigation. Nomenclature relevant to each user is often specific to that user, and a user interface invalid or confusing for a user can hinder what might otherwise be a simple transaction; to that end we shall investigate the use of user-based context in the virtual try-on scenario.

Our main methodology is to exploit the knowledge of human body shapes obtained from the statistical analysis of large anthropometric databases, which will allow us to reconstruct individual body shapes from partial data. The key to this is (i) the creation of massive pre-processed database followed by the statistical characterization of this database (ii) the adaptation of the extracted characteristics onto the customer’s photograph to estimate 3D body shape on the database and (iii) the personalized adjustment of shape and appearance with photograph images.

It is expected a friendly user interface which enables information extraction on subject’s input and personalized 3D human body creation allowing 3D visualization and manipulation.

5- TSX Fixed Income Research Program

Principal Investigator:

Dr. Ali Montazemi
Professor and Director of eBusiness Program
DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University

Co-Investigators:

Dr. John Siam
Professor, Accounting and Financial Management
DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University

Private Sector Partners

Canadian Market Dealers:

BMO Nesbitt Burns Inc.

CIBC World Market Inc.

National Bank Financial Inc.

RBC Dominion Securities Inc.

Scotia Capital Inc.

TD Securities Inc.

TSX Inc.

Start and End Dates:

April 01, 2006 – December 15, 2007

Summary

This research program is about technology-based organizational issues that affect use of electronic transaction systems for Fixed-Income Markets. The focus of this research is to find out to what extent B2B technologies in form of trading platforms is considered as competence enhancing or competence destroying within the context of an efficient FI (fixed-income) market. It is estimated that the global FI market is about $45 trillion. An FI security is defined as one whose income stream is fixed for the duration of the loan and whose maturity and face value are known. Unlike equities that are traded on exchanges and are subject to exchange rules, FI securities trade over the counter.
Information systems can serve as intermediaries between the buyers and the sellers in a market, creating an “electronic marketplace” that lowers the buyers’ cost to acquire information about sellers’ prices and product offerings. Markets have three main functions: matching buyers and sellers; facilitating an efficient exchange of information, goods, services and payments associated with market transactions; and providing an institutional infrastructure, such as a legal and regulatory framework, that enables the market to function efficiently. Operational efficiency means that market participants are able to conduct transactions at competitive cost, and informational efficiency means that all available information is incorporated into the price. The degree of informational and operational efficiency determines the extent to which markets are allocationally effective.
Information is critical to market transparency in FI trade. Market transparency refers to the amount of quote, price and volume information available to markets and to the general public. In FI markets, dealers provide quotes to a potential counterparty. They also act as market-makers, taking on inventory risk. Complete transparency in these circumstances may reduce their ability to manage this risk, which could have the perverse effect of reducing liquidity and increasing transaction costs. Thus, we find information asymmetry to be an important aspect of FI market operation. Information asymmetry arises when one side has private information which is not disclosed to the other side, and it is the cornerstone of the FI trades environment. This information could be about securities and their issuers, about general market conditions, about economic events, or about the analytic models used to analyze the profit margin of particular securities.
In recent years we have witnessed the growth of B2B electronic trading systems use in support of FI trade. To date, there are at least 44 B2B platforms used internationally. The growth in online trading in derivatives reflects the rapid growth that has taken place in the market in the use of derivative products and the vital role these play in FI portfolios and it reflects also a trend towards commoditization in some sectors of the derivatives market. It also points to the greater efficiency brought about by electronic execution in a product sector where just a few years ago electronic trading was a novelty. Online bond-trading platforms have accelerated the development and implementation of value-added services to enhance the efficiency of electronic trade execution and to reduce users’ costs. A recent survey shows that virtually all of the trading platforms offer a combination of the following services: (a) pricing data, (b) confirmation and allocation services, (c) pre-trade analytics, (d) matching services, (e) electronic research delivery, (f) regulatory compliance services, (g) risk monitoring or management services and (h) identity management services. Nonetheless, the telephone is still the main means of information flow between buyers and sellers in FI market. The question raised is whether it is possible to increase use of B2B trading for improved market efficiency.
A change in fixed-income market trading technology entails adjusting the tools, devices, knowledge, or techniques that mediate between buyers-sellers. Technological changes can be classified as competence-enhancing or competence-destroying. Competence-enhancing adjustments, which build on existing know-how within the organization, tend to consolidate industry leadership. In contrast, the introduction of fundamentally different technologies or competence-destroying discontinuities is associated with major changes in the distribution of power and control. Competence discontinuities disrupt industry structure. Regardless of the extent to which a technological discontinuity is competence-enhancing or competence-destroying, the change in technology increases uncertainty as attempts are made to master new tools, devices, or techniques.
Thus, our research is guided by the following central questions:

What are the implications of information flow to mediate brokerage relationships that are enacted through the work practices and interaction of actors in FI market?

What are the sources of influence on beliefs about IT use & institution-based trust in inter-organizational exchange relationships among actors in FI market?

What kind of information systems can be adopted in support of different activities of the actors in FI market for optimal trade?