Associate Professor
BIS

Byron Marshall

Overview
Overview
Background
Publications

Overview

Career Interests

Byron's research interests include information security and the re-use of organizational data in informal node-link knowledge representations to support analysis tasks. Previous work includes applications in bioinformatics, business intelligence, digital library, law enforcement, and education. He received a Ph.D. in Management Information Systems from the University of Arizona in May, 2005; an MBA degree with emphasis in Accounting from California State University, Fresno in 1995; and a BA in Business Administration-Computer Applications and Systems from California State University, Fresno in 1988. Byron has 13 years of dynamic industry experience designing, creating, and using computer systems in the cotton industry.

 

Background

Education

2001-2005: University of Arizona, MIS Department, Tucson, AZ PhD - Management Spring 2005 Major: Management Information Systems, Minor: Linguistics Advisor: Dr. Hsinchun Chen

1995: California State University, Fresno Fresno, CA MBA – emphasis in accounting   Graduated with distinction

1988: California State University Fresno Fresno, CA BS – Business Administration – Computer Applications and Systems

Experience

Byron has 13 years of dynamic industry experience designing, creating, and using computer systems in the cotton industry.

Professional Affiliations

Member: AIS, IEEE, ACM, ISACA Academic Advocate

Associate Editor: Journal of Electronic Commerce Research

Publications

Conference
BIS

“Visualizing Aggregated Biological Pathway Relations”

The Genescene development team has constructed an aggregation interface for automatically-extracted biomedical pathway
relations that is intended to help researchers identify and process relevant information from the vast digital library of abstracts found in the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed collection.
Users view extracted relations at various levels of relational granularity in an interactive and visual node-link interface. Anecdotal feedback reported here suggests that this multigranular visual paradigm aligns well with various research tasks,
helping users find relevant articles and discover new information.
Details
Academic Journal
BIS

“Extracting Gene Pathway Relations Using a Hybrid Grammar: The Arizona Relation Parser”

Motivation: Text-mining research in the biomedical domain has been motivated by the rapid growth of new research findings. Improving the accessibility of findings has potential to speed hypothesis generation.

Results: We present the Arizona Relation Parser that differs from other parsers in its use of a broad coverage syntax-semantic hybrid grammar. While syntax grammars have generally been tested over more documents, semantic grammars have outperformed them in precision and recall. We combined access to syntax and semantic information from a single grammar. The parser was trained using 40 PubMed abstracts and then tested using 100 unseen abstracts, half for precision and half for recall. Expert evaluation showed that the parser extracted biologically relevant relations with 89% precision. Recall of expert identified relations with semantic filtering was 35 and 61% before semantic filtering. Such results approach the higher-performing semantic parsers. However, the AZ parser was tested over a greater variety of writing styles and semantic content.
Details
Academic Journal
BIS

“A Case-based Reasoning Framework for Workflow Model Management”

In order to support efficient workflow design, recent commercial workflow systems are providing templates of common business processes. These templates, called cases, can be modified individually or collectively into a new workflow to meet the business specification. However, little research has been done on how to manage workflow models, including issues such as model storage, model retrieval, model reuse and assembly. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to support workflow modeling and design by adapting workflow cases from a repository of process models. Our approach to workflow model management is based on a structured workflow lifecycle and leverages recent advances in model management and case-based reasoning techniques. Our contributions include a conceptual model of workflow cases, a similarity flooding algorithm for workflow case retrieval, and a domain-independent AI planning approach to workflow case composition. We illustrate the workflow model management framework with a prototype system called Case-Oriented Design Assistant for Workflow Modeling (CODAW).
Details
Academic Journal
BIS

“EBizPort: Collecting and Analyzing Business Intelligence Information”

In this article, Marshall, McDonald, Chen, and Chung take a different approach to supporting search services to large and heterogeneous document collections. They propose development of a domain-specific collection by crawling the content of a small set of highly reputable sites, maintaining a local index of the content, and providing browsing and searching services on the specialized content. This resource, known as a vertical portal, has the potential of overcoming several problems associated with bias, update delay, reputation, and integration of scattered information. The article discusses the design of a vertical portal system's architecture called EbizPort, rationale behind its major components, and algorithms and techniques for building collections and search functions. Collection (or more broadly content) has an obvious relationship to the nature of the search interface, as it can impact the type of search functions that can be offered. Powerful search interface functions were built for EbizPort by exploiting the underlying content representation and a relatively narrow and well-defined domain focus. Particularly noteworthy are the innovative browsing functions, which include a summarizer, a categorizer, a visualizer, and a navigation side-bar. The article ends with a discussion of an evaluation study, which compared the EbizPort system with a baseline system called Brint. Results are presented on effectiveness and efficiency, usability and information quality, and quality of local collection and content retrieved from other sources (an extended search operation called meta-search service was also provided in the system). Overall, the authors find that EbizPort outperforms the baseline system, and it provides a viable way to support access to business information.
Details
Conference
BIS

“Knowledge Management and E-Learning: the GetSmart Experience”

The National Science Digital Library (NSDL), launched in December 2002, is emerging as a center of innovation in digital libraries as applied to education. As a part of this extensive project, the GetSmart system was created to apply knowledge management techniques in a learning environment. The design of the system is based on an analysis of learning theory and the information search process. Its key notion is the integration of search tools and curriculum support with concept mapping. More than 100 students at the University of Arizona and Virginia Tech used the system in the fall of 2002. A database of more than one thousand student-prepared concept maps has been collected with more than forty thousand relationships expressed in semantic, graphical, node-link representations. Preliminary analysis of the collected data is revealing interesting knowledge representation patterns.
Details