WU AWARDED NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION GRANT

Harris Wu, assistant professor of information technology and decision sciences at Old Dominion University, received a $299,942 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for his proposal entitled "Supporting Case-Based Design for Packaged Software Implementations." The project falls within NSF's interdisciplinary Science of Design program.

According to Wu, there is an increasing trend in information systems to utilize large software packages that must be customized and redesigned to integrate them into other existing and evolving systems. The research project focuses on Case-Based Design (CBD), a method for leveraging prior experiences to identify current problems or decisions and developing solutions for such problems or decisions based on those of the prior experiences.

Wu believes better designs can be achieved at lower costs with lower risks by utilizing the collective power of a large group of people. Consequently, the project proposes to develop and evaluate an open-source tool to support case-based design in packaged software implementations.

Wu holds a doctorate in business information technology and a graduate certificate in complex systems from the University of Michigan, a master's degree in computer science from Florida State University, and a Bachelor of Science in mathematics from Nankai University. Before joining ODU's faculty in 2005, he had over ten years of industry experience in IT/business consulting, management, marketing, software development, and entrepreneurship.