I am very happy to report that our FITA 2008 Conference was a blast!

The 2008 Arizona Symposium on Frontiers in Information Technology and Applications (FITA 2008) was held at the Eller College of Management, The University of Arizona on February 29 – March 1, 2008.  The conference attracted over 220 attendees.

The Department of Management Information Systems (MIS) hosted this outreach conference to promote collaborations between academia and the industry.  The theme of FITA 2008 was to "Integrate Corporate Needs, Student Talents, and Faculty Expertise to Solve Real World Problems."  Several conference attendees from the corporate world were very impressed with our faculty and students and told Dean Portney and myself that they will return soon to recruit a significant number of our students.

  View pictures taken during the conference here

From pioneering one of the early MIS programs three decades ago in 1974, the faculty members in the MIS department at the Eller College of Management have been at the forefront of education and research in information technology and management.  FITA 2008 showcased our collaboration with industrial leaders and other academic colleagues on various frontier research and application areas such as Boarder Security and Immigration, Cyber Security, Online Marking, IT investments, IT Governance, New Perspectives in ERP, IT in Defense, and Service Management and Computing.

The main conference goal was to promote exchanges among corporations and universities in the area of information technology and its applications. Specific objectives were to help corporations sharpen their insights about problems and solutions, enable students to showcase their talents and find internships/jobs, and allow faculty to acquire real world projects and data. The program consisted of two keynote speeches, eight planery talks, and 36 other invited and submitted presentations, 21 graduate student posters, and nine undergraduate case competition teams – all of which helped to facilitate the networking and exchange of ideas among conference participants.

Many people contributed to the planning and organization of FITA 2008 including the various conference chairs including Jay Nunamaker, Sudha Ram, Daniel Zeng, Hsinchun Chen, Styne Hill, Doug Brown, Jane Prescott-Smith, Dina Wilkinson, Ron Schott, Leslie Bromberg, Larry Dyer, Cathy Larson, Moshe Dror, Josh Smith, Josh Hottenstein, and Clayton Hamilton.

Session chairs included Mike Shaw, Sue Brown, George Ball, David Pingry, Jim Spohrer, Hsinchun Chen, Daniel Zeng, Bob Lusch, Jay Nunamaker, and Bill Neumann were extremely helpful with attracting many excellent speakers for the conference. In particular, I would like to thank Anji Siegel for her tireless effort and professional expertise with managing various critical logistic and marketing issues.

We could not have conducted the conference without the help of our many volunteers who included Nachalin Suakkaphong, Aaron Sun, Yan An, Manlu Liu, Jun Liu, Maria Puig, Mary Lambert, Mona Lopez, Jae Park, Joyce Chen, Michele Pesnell, Jae Park, Nelly Zapata, Chris Diller, Laura Reid, Mark Patton, Ron Schott, Bill Neumann, Yu-Fang Huang (Jamie), Matt Jensen, and Roberto Mejias.

Lastly, we would like to thank the FITA 2008 sponsors including Eller College, sanofi-aventis, SAP, Raytheon, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and IBM.  Without their generous support, this conference would not have been possible.

We had many very interesting and excellent presentations during FITA 2008. To make them available to more people, we will be posting the conference presentations online at http://fita2008.ecom.arizona.edu/ over the next couple of weeks.  

Thank you,

J. Leon Zhao, Eller Professor and Interim Head