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Agent-based models (ABMs), also sometimes called agent distillations or cellular automata models, have found tremendous success in an especially wide spectrum of applications. Such models have also been used in financial modeling, personnel modeling, in military applications such as examining the impacts of tactical airpower or logistical supply, in social science modeling and even in a variety of manufacturing applications. Multiagent systems (MAS) are a special kind of ABM in which a group of systems or entities interact with each other and their environment. An agent in a MAS can represent a human, group of humans, a machine or a software system with the capability to perceive their environment, react to changes in the environment and affect the environment with their own actions.

In an ABM, entities are constructed to have specified goals or actions. Agents can control their own destiny which means they may change their internal state depending on their knowledge of the artificial environment in which they reside and function. This cognitive capability of the agents is necessary so agents can achieve the specified goal or criterion within the context of the application. The agents are usually modeled in an object-oriented manner but suitably extended to include representation of their knowledge and roles within an environment. Thus, an agent can have knowledge of itself, knowledge received from other agents through communication and sensory channels, knowledge based on perceptions of its environment, and even memory of previous states the agent found itself. Among the challenges to ABM are designing these agents to encapsulate this information in such a way that the knowledge is controlled and exploited by the software agent, ensuring the ABM realistically captures the actual system of interest, and analyzing the emergent behavior that often arises in the use of these models.

My hobbies are pretty broad, so I joined several clubs here: Photography and traveling club, dance club and tennis club. Photography is sort of a social contagion. Some people who I am familiar with are really good at photography (e.g. Professor Dongwon Lee). People just cannot help marveling at those so-much fantastic pictures and then wish to do the same thing by themselves some day. I am among of them, so I start off learning photography. However, professional cameras are expensive, not to say high-quality lenses. Dance is an elegant exercise, or should I say, art. It makes me perfectly relax and step out of any upset and annoyance. Dance is also an ambassador of getting people known with each other in some social activities. Tennis is an excellent outdoor exercise: not too intensive as soccer and not too dangerous as football. It emphasizes a balance of body strength and skills.  I always believe a good body is the key to survive the Ph.D. (also known as Permanent Head Damage)

As I can manage the time better and better, I hope I am able to get out of the box and to participate some non-Chinese based associations or clubs. After all, I cannot know well about American culture and style without getting along with Americans.

I would like to talk a little bit about John Henry Holland. I first know him from my previous advisor, Prof. Chen, when I was a master at Renmin Univ. of China. Prof. Chen is the first Chinese scholar who visited the Santa Fe Institute and thereby introduced the complex system theory into China. In Santa Fe Institute Prof. Chen met Holland and then they became friends. Later then, Holland visited our Economics Science Lab in the School of Information.

John H. Holland is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is generally known as the father of genetic algorithms. Nevertheless, he is also the pioneer of complex system and nonlinear science.

Dr. Holland was born in 1929. He earned a B.A. in Physics in MIT and M.A. in Mathematics and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Michigan.

In his seminal book "Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems", Dr. Holland introduced the Genetic Algorithm. I have read two of his influential books: "Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity" and "Emergence: From Chaos to Order". These two books have fundamentally changed the perspectives as we see the world. Holland and his colleagues in Santa Fe Institute share a deep impatience with the kind of linear, reductionist thinking that has long dominated science since the Newton age. Instead, they are creating novel ideas about coevaltion, chaos, order and nonlinearity. This kind of ideas is demonstrating its vitality in understanding and illustrating universe, life and human social behavior.

IT Standards & Standardization Research (JITSR) and The Journal of Strategic Information Systems are two among them.

The International Journal of IT Standards & Standardization Research [1] aims to be a platform for presenting, and discussing, the broad variety of aspects that make up IT standards research. This includes, but is certainly not limited to, contributions from the disciplines of computer science, information systems, management, business, social sciences (especially science and technology studies), economics, engineering, political science, public policy, sociology, communication, and human factors/usability. In particular, the journal wants to both support and promote multi-disciplinary research on IT standards; 'IT' should be understood in a very broad sense."

The Journal of Strategic Information Systems [2] focuses on the management, business and organizational issues associated with the introduction and utilization of information systems as a strategic tool, and considers these issues in a global context. The emphasis is on the incorporation of IT into organizations' strategic thinking, strategy alignment and management of change issues. The journal publishes research and case study papers from around the world which:

• investigate the very nature of business in the context of emerging IT

• discuss the justification and evaluation of information systems

• discuss the organizational implications of IT

• consider how organizations have been transformed as a result of the astute management and application of IT

The International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) [3] is the most prestigious gathering of I/S academics and research-oriented practitioners in the world. Every year its 45 or so papers and panel presentations are selected from over 200 submissions, and the ICIS Proceedings, available on CD-ROM through 2000, are in the permanent collections of libraries throughout the world. The Conference activities are primarily delivered by and for academics, though many of the papers and panels have a strong professional orientation.

Of special interest to me is that ICIS invites nominations for the ACM SIGMIS Doctoral Dissertation Award Competition every year. They look for outstanding doctoral dissertations around the globe in the field of information systems. Ph.D. students who are working on Information Systems dissertations are eligible for nomination for ICIS Doctoral Consortium.

[1] http://www.nets.rwth-aachen.de/~jakobs/standards_journal/journal_home.html

[2] http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/525447/description#description

[3] http://home.aisnet.org/displaycommon.cfm?an=1&subarticlenbr=79

AIS treat a basket of 6 journals as top journals in "IS field". They are (in alphabetical order):

European Journal of Information Systems

²       Information Systems Journal

²       Information Systems Research

²       Journal of AIS

²       Journal of MIS

²       MIS Quarterly

The Link of the journal ranking is

 http://ais.affiniscape.com/displaycommon.cfm?an=1&subarticlenbr=432

In terms of his research area, Phill examines the sociotechnical dynamics and integration of work, technology and people. He has got his papers published in a number of conferences. To name a few, they are Proceedings of the Organization Design and Management XI Annual Meeting, Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, Proceedings of the 15th Triennial Congress of the International Ergonomics Association. In addition, Phillip has made several presentations in a variety of workshops. Remarkably, Phillip holds three pieces of patents.

Phillip is very active not only in his academic area but also in some extra-curriculum activities. He has a lot of title surrounding with him: president of Pennsylvania State University Student Chapter, head coach of men's club soccer team, Rock Climbing Supervisor and members of Aircraft Owners and pilots association.

It is really amazing to me that Phillip is a well-developed person. How can a man be successful in so many aspects of his career? I guess it is attributed to his great enthusiasm to life and excellent skills of time management.

My advisor is Dr. Angsana Techatassanasoontorn. Just like many other Thai, she has a pretty long last name. So far as I know, she is the only Thai professor at University Park. Puck (who is a Thai student in IST) once told me that there was a student in penn state who wanted to conduct an interview with a Thai professor. He searched the whole faculty list and surprisingly, he found Dr. Angsana is the only one.

Dr. Angsana has got her family with her in State College. She has a very adorable daughter. But I don't think I have the liberty to post her daughter's photo. Dr. Angsana's husband also works here. As for her hobbies, she likes yoga and takes yoga courses every Friday.

Dr. Angsana has a relatively rich experience in terms of her career. Graduating from the best university in Thailand, she starts off her career as a programmer in two companies sequentially. At this job, Dr. angsana got her passion of using knowledge to teach and train others. About fifteen years ago, she went to Arizona Univ. to further her master degree with concentration on MIS. After that, she came back to Thailand and worked as a college instructor for seven years. In 2000, she began her PhD training at Univ. of Minnesota, which has the largest MIS center in the world. The department chair and well-known scholar in the field of MIS, Professor Robert J. Kauffman is the very advisor of her. In 2005 she came to Penn State as an instructor and then become an assistant professor of IST.

As a young professor, Dr. Angsana doesn't have a fancy CV with a long list of publications. Nevertheless, I can tell that she is pretty knowledgeable. I feel very lucky to choose her as my advisor and work with her. I am her research assistant from the very beginning. She teaches me, trains me and cultivates me a lot and shows the right ways of doing research, rather than just simply assigning me some jobs while not paying too much attention to how to pull them through. That is something more than a relationship between employers and employee. I still remember some hard times in the first academic year and she is always the person I can fall back on. She gives me a lot of encouragement and compliment. I would say she is my advisor academically as well as mentally. For those who are considering applying IST and choosing advisors, believe me, Dr. Angsana is a good choice.

The non-department structure is a unique characteristic of IST. In my opinion, such a structure has apparent advantages as we always advocate, as well as potential disadvantages as we may overlook. We IST have a very, very broad spectrum of research areas, and having no departments to a large extent facilitates the collaboration among faculty/students with different research interests and backgrounds. Another apparent benefit is that it helps student build wide perspectives in addressing issues associated with information technology, rather than analyzing them from a single isolated angel of Information, People or Technology. On the flip side, having no department also brings about some undesirable results. Because of no department, each research slice in the huge IST pizza is not of the same size. That is to say, the development of each area is lack of balance. We have two large groups of computational informatics and HCI, leading by Professor Lee and Professor Carroll respectively. However, groups of computational intelligence and information security are not that big. The overemphasis on the broadth of IST PhD trainning can also be reflected from the curriculum. It seems to me we have fairly few courses beyond those four IST core courses. For second year students, we have no choice but to take a variety of theory or methodology courses outside of IST. I strongly suggest IST open more optional courses focusing on each specific research areas to sharpen our understanding.

A question raised here is what is the best structure for the good of IST's future development. I think we can address this question from the perspective of organization science. There are basically two types of structures for business firms: hierarchical and horizontal. Hierarchical structures allow firms more controls on subsections and thus make sure the firms on the good track. The horizontal one has been accepted as an appropriate model for the knowledge age because it facilitates innovation and creation. Is IST better off to find a good balance between hierarchical and horizontal models in terms of its structure? I think it is an interesting question worth to be explored.

As a new education program, the iSchool seems urgent in identifying itself and being acknowledged by other well-established programs. I think that is the reason why we have a lot of discussion or even debate about who we are and what we are doing here in several courses I have ever taken. So in this posting, I try to summarize some of my previous thoughts toward justifying the existence of iSchools.

We are facing complex real-world problems in which information, people, and technology intertwine as an interdependent system. Can we just bring together scholars from sociology, computer science and library science to provide any possible solutions? Probably we can. I believe it is not the optimal approach, however, because of communication obstacles and diverse training trajectories. People from different fields are equipped with particular perspectives that substantially influence their experience on certain things. Because of the lack of common knowledge, communication turns out to be less efficient and with loss. Such problem may be better solved provided that scholars have an interdisciplinary background that covers library science, computer science and sociology. Hence, I believe that interdisciplinary program is superior to the add-up of disciplines when addressing interdisciplinary issues.

What we are doing in terms of methodology of research in I-School? Take our IST program for example, research works of T (technology) side are usually dominated by computer programming experiments, or in more common terms, by trial-and-error; research works of P (people) side are largely characterized by multiple methods, from quantitative to qualitative. I-School is a program of many specialties such that no one traditional degree program has the required breadth. I-School is created by recruiting people from different background or by evolving from a traditional program such as library science. We IST fall into the first category. It started from scratch.  Within IST community parallel a number of methods of scientific inquiry, however, these methods do share a common problem-solving schema. Respectively, faculty and students are largely divided into three major sides according to their research focuses. The story is that research works of technology side are very different from that of computer sciences, research works of people side are very different from that of business school and sociology, and research works of information side are very different from that of library science. Why? I guess the reason rests on that we are one rather than multiple research community and we share the common values that issues related to information sciences and technology are better understood through an integrated perspective. Once we become clearer about implicit agreements and shared understandings, many of these differences begin to look like differences of emphasis rather than absolute cleavages.

As we know, some of the established I-Schools come from departments of library science. If a unique I-School curriculum ought to exist, then an I-School ought to be more than a library school with a name that implies modern times. My understanding is a curriculum is the materialization and hallmark of a paradigm: if a curriculum changes dramatically, a revolution takes place. At this moment, I believe I-School has its new paradigm. Moving on to another scenario, I-School is founded from scratch, like IST, that brings together computer scientist, sociologist, management experts as well as law expert. Do we have a new paradigm beyond these territories? I think so at the student level. It is fairly clear that students are trained in a very different way, compared with that of computer science, sociology and business school. Students to a large extent share similar curriculum, though their research focuses vary. For faculty, they come to IST with different academic training colors, such a thing that may undermine the formation of the common paradigm among them for a long time. One the flip side, we must see paradigm evolves as the product of joint effort of faulty, students and social acknowledgement.  It is a process in which our world view is shaped and being shaped by the paradigm. It is like a game which we are all together playing with.

If I don't intend to be a scholar in the future, people may question where my passion of attending a Ph.D. program is. I need an intensive Ph.D. training in United States because I think I have not been equipped with solid expertise and knowledge base in my area, because I want to know more about the world personally, and because I want to learn some practical things from a different culture beyond the textbook. Knowledge is of course important, but not as much as the way of gaining knowledge. There is no doubt that the Ph.D. programs in United States are generally much more demanding and challenging than those in China. I will for sure have a great sense of achievement when I pull off the program.

So why choosing IST? It has to do something with my academic background and interests. My undergraduate program is information management and information system. Literally, it was an interdisciplinary program, covering management, economics, information theory, computer engineering, and operations research. The second diploma is Master of Science in system science. Though sounds a little bit weird, the system science is a program in information school. I dealt with social and economic problems by using computational modeling and simulation. Basically, I can say that before I came here, I was closely bounded up with information-related stuff in terms of what I learnt. Such a background cultivates me broad interests and great zest toward knowledge and issues in the field of information sciences and technology. The more I study in this area, the more I feel that it is amazing to explain or solve problems using an integrative perspective. I do believe it is the charm of IST, and other interdisciplinary programs.

My advisor is Dr. AngsanaTechatassanasoontorn. I have been collaborating with her in several research projects. One project that is about to pull off soon is developing new theories and empirically testing factors that drive the diffusion of municipal broadband wireless network. Through a longitudinal study on the diffusion of municipal wireless networks among cities in the United States, we attempt to explain how interested actors shape the structure and culture of communities in order to facilitate the adoption and use of community technologies.

You may get my name from the description of this blog.Yeah, Shuguang Suo is the name shown in my ID, but I would like you to call me Arthur. I like this name for it was the name of a legendary British leader:

In terms of the nationality, I come from China, one of the greatest country in the world. The 2008 Beijing Olympics has been perfectly showing China's quest for solidarity, friendship and peace. Back in my childhood, I was born in a coastal city of Shandong province. For some historical reasons, people from Shandong province are most likely given credits for their faithfulness, honesty and braveness. I often miss the old days before I left home and started my college life because I enjoyed a lot of sea foods: they are delicious and nutritive.

I am not a guy with the highest intelligence, but I do have a broad academic interest and more importantly, I like to challenge myself. After earning a bachelor degree in Information Management and Information System, I marched on my academic career toward the M.S. in System Science. The three-year graduate life was the most wonderful times with numerous good memories to cherish. I have been well trained within the classrooms as well as outside of the campus. I associated myself with all kinds of people and some of them became my close friends. Personally, I see friends as a treasure that can benefit me for life. Just before coming to United States, I touched a little bit with industry job. I worked as an intern in China Hewlett-Packard Co. with great enthusiasm and zest. That was my first job experience.     

Besides, I am a big fan of sports: Tennis, swimming, workout, running, badminton, basketball, skiing, skating, hiking and so forth. One thing I need to make it clear is that I don't play soccer because China Soccer has a aweful reputation not only for the skills but for the quality of the players. I should not even take about it in my blog. It sucks.

Travelling is one of my favorite recreations. But based on my first year experience of the PHD, I feel overloaded most of time. Now I can better balance my coursework and leisure time: the dog equally study, the gentleman equally plays.