Poznan University of Economics

Established in 1926, the Poznan University of Economics (PUE) is one of the oldest and most prestigious business universities in Poland. The school is a 16,000-strong academic and research centre, specialising in the education of highly-qualified management personnel, economic and IT experts, as well as national and local administration workers. The university’s main strengths are its educational base, international relations, well-developed research base and its co-operation with business and industry. It is the only university in Poland to enjoy the full academic rights in economics, management and commodity sciences.

Members of the university’s research personnel sit on various advisory committees, participate in research projects, offer expert opinions, and advise business entities and state agencies. The Poznan University of Economics lays great emphasis on the internationalisation of education and research. The number of foreign partner universities co-operating with the Poznan University of Economics is growing steadily. The university’s lecturers actively participate in the work of international research networks and groups, and in intergovernmental research projects. They also give guest lectures at universities abroad. The number of international research consortia and projects financed from European funds is also constantly increasing.

Department of Information Systems

The Department of Information Systems (DIS) is a part of the faculty of Informatics and Electronic Economy (one of five faculties at PUE). Currently there are 23 people (including 5 post-docs, 2 research assistants, 8 full-time PhD students) employed in the department. A diversity of interests, research enthusiasm, and a good record of funding and research activities are the features of the department’s members. DIS has more than 80 master and bachelor students a year. Its undisputed value are the PhD students (about 30 full and part-time students).

Research Areas

The Department of Information Systems has a vibrant research culture with regular research and educational events such as seminars and workshops (e.g. with fellow researchers from Germany, Australia or the United Kingdom) or Summer Seminars for master students. PUE hosts conferences as well as workshops throughout the year. The event making the biggest impact is the international conference - Business Information Systems organized yearly, starting from 1997, by DIS and usually held in Poznan at PUE.

The research at DIS concentrates on areas that are considered worldwide to be vital and lively topics, namely: knowledge and information management, information filtering and retrieval, information extraction, contexts, knowledge representation methods, knowledge management systems, semantic technologies, Web services, Web 2.0 as well as the non-functional properties of Semantic Web services. Most members work in a few of the focus groups, and inter-group research is encouraged. Individual research groups hold their own meetings and, in some cases, their own seminar series.

The members of DIS are active participants in international (e.g. ACM, IEEE) and national IT societies (e.g. Polish Society of Information Systems).

International Collaboration

DIS holds a very active national, but first of all, international collaboration, that manifests itself in various activities and joint undertakings. European projects namely ENIRAF (Enhanced Information Retrieval and Filtering for Analytical Systems) funded under the Marie Curie Programme and EASTWEB (Building an integrated leading Euro-Asian higher education and research community in the field of the Semantic Web) funded under the Asia-Link Programme resulted within the two previous years in 1 to 4 month stays for visiting researchers, who contributed greatly to the research environment. We hosted visiting scholars from Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium), Deutsches Forschungszentrum fuer Kuenstliche Intelligenz (Germany), Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (Spain), University of Queensland (Australia), Asian Institute of Technology (Thailand), Seoul National University (Korea), and Open University (Great Britain). DIS expects to host a few more Asian researchers as well as sabbaticals for DIS members at Asian universities are also envisioned. The Department applies the University’s rules to sabbatical leave, which allows research-active staff to have a few months research leave after every 2 years. DIS members recently visited Forschungszentrum Informatik an der Universität Karlsruhe (Germany), Institut für Informatik der Universität Innsbruck (Austria), the University College of Stavanger (Norway), the SAP Research Centre in Dresden (Germany) and Brisbane (Australia), the Macquarie University (Australia), Microsoft Research Asia (China), and the Asian Institute of Technology (Thailand). Such international collaboration also resulted in 2 PhD Students from DIS simultaneously starting PhD courses at two universities, at PUE and at the Macquarie University in Sydney, under the Cotutelle Agreement.

Publications

The DIS members frequently publish the results of their research at various international conferences, including WWW and VLDB, as well as in international journals (e.g. Witschaftsinformatik). In recent years, members of DIS have been invited to take part in a wide range of activities at an international level: conference chairmanship, editorships of books. The researchers employed are valued and esteemed experts in their research fields, and, as such, they participate in Programme Committees at numerous conferences and workshops. All staff regularly review papers for respected international journals and conferences.

Projects

This strong international collaboration has also become the basis for starting up a few joint projects. The following 6^th Framework European projects have been carried out at DIS, namelySemantics Utilised for Process management within and between EnteRprises (SUPER), a Time-determined Ontology based information system for real time stock market analysis (TOWL), a Usability-driven open platform for mobile government (USE-ME.GOV), and an Adaptive Services Grid (ASG). Other international projects are the European network of excellence called Knowledge Web and Service Web 3.0, which is funded under the 7^th Framework Programme.

DIS also carries out national projects, e.g. a project funded by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education, namely, Integrating Platform as a Methodology for Creation of Solutions for Mobile Government. Moreover, members of DIS are involved in the National Foresight Programme “Poland 2020”, leading on the panels. There are also some internal projects granted by the university itself, which are relevant to the research areas of DIS (e.g. HyperSDI, Knowledge e-marketplace, Hyper-Workflow).

External Relations

The Department has also got strong relations with business and industry. Joint work has been undertaken with international and national companies (e.g. SAP, Microsoft, Rodan System, PolSoft, Telekomunikacja Polska SA, IT.Integro). In addition, DIS gathered the group of IT companies interested in cooperation, i.e. participation in the projects, sponsorship of the events organised as well as sponsorship of the IT infrastructure. Cooperation with business partners, also with international IT companies like SAP or Microsoft, stimulates research through real problems and allows research results to be validated on realistic applications.

PUE provides DIS with appropriate facilities (e.g. conference rooms, meeting rooms, library etc.), IT infrastructure (computers and network facility) as well as software (e.g. MSDN licence from Microsoft under the Academic Alliance agreement).