Kevin Mentzer

Foresight for a responsible future with ICT

The ACM Code of Ethics asserts that computing professionals have an ethical responsibility to minimize the negative consequences of information and communication technologies (ICT). Negative consequences are rarely intended, but they can often be foreseen with careful sociotechnical analysis in advance of system building. Motivated by an interest in extremely complex sociotechnical contexts (e.g., mortgage lending and automated trading) where ICT appears to be having negative consequences in addition to many benefits, this paper identifies and evaluates future-oriented problem analysis and solution design tools in three potentially relevant literatures: 1) ICT ethics, 2) environmental sustainability, and 3) technology hazards. Several promising future-oriented technology analysis techniques (e.g., anticipatory technology ethics, technology roadmapping, morphological analysis, and control structure analysis) were found and are discussed in this paper, but much work remains to be done to customize them, integrate them, and codify them for use in education and high-quality IS research on very complex sociotechnical contexts like the global financial network.

Organizational and Institutional Arrangements for E-Government: A Preliminary Report on Contemporary IT Management Approaches in US State Governments

The success of e-government is believed to depend in part on the organizational and institutional arrangements that governments enact for the management of their IT resources. This paper develops the conceptualization of IT management arrangements by considering possible interactions between two dimensions-1) the organization of IT activities and 2) control over decisions about IT activities (also known as governance)-for each of two categories of IT activities-1) IT projects (such as website development) and 2) IT services (such as the operation of networks). In addition, the paper provides preliminary empirical evidence obtained from applying this expanded conceptualization in the context of American state governments. Many states appear to employ centralization of IT activities to offset decentralization of IT control and vice versa. Consequently, neither dimension alone provides a good characterization of governmental IT management arrangements. These findings have the potential to enhance our understanding of the barriers to, and enablers of e-government success.

Visualization of Very Large Networks: The Co-starring Social Network

This chapter describes and contrasts two main approaches to visualizing the very large actor co-starring network. Technical details on how to construct the visualizations are provided and memory problems discussed. The chapter demonstrates a successful use of k-core techniques for visualizing large networks.

Movie analytics: Visualization of the co-starring network

This poster contributes a novel application of social network visualization techniques to the motion picture industry. We make the case and illustrate with examples that a visualization approach based on k-cores helps alleviate otherwise inextricable memory issues in analyses of the IMDb co-starring network, which contains more than 2.6 million actors displaying over a billion links, with degrees which can rise to about 50,000 and above for the most connected actors.

Is the corporate elite disintegrating?: Interlock boards and the Mizruchi hypothesis

This paper proposes an approach for comparing interlocked board networks over time to test for statistically significant change. In addition to contributing to the conversation about whether the Mizruchi hypothesis (that a disintegration of power is occurring within the corporate elite) holds or not, we propose novel methods to handle a longitudinal investigation of a series of social networks where the nodes undergo a few modifications at each time point. Methodologically, our contribution is two-fold: we extend a Bayesian model hereto applied to compare two time periods to a longer time period, and we define and employ the concept of a hull of a sequence of social networks, which makes it possible to circumvent the problem of changing nodes over time.

What Do We Know About Analyzing Movie Data

This chapter gives a road map of the topics discussed in the monograph and briefly introduces what is meant by “Movie Analytics”.

Movie Attendance and Trends

This chapter demonstrates how to analyze longitudinal data on weekly attendance during several years in eight different movie theaters in France, all located in small to medium sized cities in the South West part of France (the movie theaters considered in this study have from 1 to 4 rooms). Necessary R code is included and discussed.

Can We Predict Oscars from Twitter and Movie Review Data

In this chapter, we focus the attention on whether text reviews of movies which are nominated for a Best Picture award carry any sign of the likelihood of a movie winning the award. We suggest that a measure of how controversial the movie is perceived to be, the value of which could be extracted by a text analysis of the reviews, is a potential predictor of a win, aside from other predictors identified in past work. This also is an opportunity to discuss text mining and sentiment analysis techniques.

Oscar Prediction and Prediction Markets

In this chapter we examine the role of prediction markets in evaluating the probability of a nominated motion picture receiving an Academy award. We illustrate the issue with the best picture award in 2013.