Kelly Lyons Associate Professor Faculty of Information University of Toronto

Contact Info

A copy of my CV can be found here, and brief bio here.

Prior to joining the University of Toronto iSchool in January 2008, I was the Program Director of the IBM Toronto Lab Centre for Advanced Studies (CAS) which partners with university faculty members and graduate students around the world to apply their research to the software products that are built in the IBM Toronto Software Lab. For more information about my work in this role, click here.

Research

Establishing a research and teaching program in service science requires a multidisciplinary approach. It must combine knowledge about computing and technology with the social and cultural implications of how technology will be used in a specific business or societal service domain. I am a computer scientist at heart and a proud member of the computer science community. I am also very interested in how research advances in computer science can be made in order to impact something of importance (perhaps even change the world). I am fascinated by how these advances require understanding of and participation by people and society. I am extremely fortunate to be embarking on this program in the University of Toronto Faculty of Information, a leading member of the iSchool community where we study the relationship between information, technology, and people.

Research Projects

Current Projects:

The first project is a collaboration with the SAP Business Objects Vancouver Academic Research Centre in the area of collaboration technology for business intelligence with PhD student, John Peco. The breadth and scope of decision making is expanding and technological and social trends are changing our expectations of decision processes. More decisions are made collaboratively and cross-organizationally with the consideration of multiple domains, information sources, and stakeholders. This research is investigating a variety of decision-making behaviours and contexts including collaboration activities among the emergent workforce population, specifically in relation to their use of the Internet and social computing technologies. The most recent research activity consists of a survey that is being distributed among university students, recently hired employees, and current co-op/Internship students working on assignment.

The second project centres around virtual worlds as mediating technologies for human-to-human interactions in services. With Henry Kim and Saggi Nevo I am working on a project to explore and understand the use of virtual worlds to mediate human-to-human interactions in business-to-business and organizational services.

I am also working with Paul Messinger, Eleni Stroulia, Xin Ge, Annie Niu, Mike Bone, and Kristen Smirnov on various research issues in Virtual Worlds from a marketing and retail services perspective.

The third project focuses on social computing tools and how they are used to mediate human-to-human interactions in services. This work builds on an earlier project with Pranam Kolari (Yahoo!), Yelena Yesha (UMBC), Stephen Perelgut (IBM) and Jen Hawkins (IBM) on the structure and use of internal corporate blog networks. With Steve Marks, we are looking at systematic methods for deciding which business processes to implement through IT services and where and how to incorporate social computing technologies within business services. We are evaluating the methods on a library service. This project also involved Jessica Szeto through a Canadian Distributed Mentoring Project.

Research Funding

• SAP Business Objects Vancouver Academic Research Center Fellowship and Faculty Grant from May 2009 until April 2010 (renewable annually for a total of 3 years), $35,000/year, to support research of myself and my PhD student, John Peco, working on the project "Collaboration Technology for Business Intelligence".
• NSERC Discovery Grant from March 2008, $15,000/year for 3 years, Title: “Tools and methods for modeling, managing, and implementing service systems”.
• Connaught Start-Up Grant April 2008 to December 2009, $10,000, Title: “Understanding Not-for-Profit Service Systems”.

Publications

• M. Smit, K. Lyons, M. McAllister, & J. Slonim, “Detecting Privacy Infractions in Applications: A Framework and Methodology”, Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Symposium on Trust, Security and Privacy for Pervasive Applications, October 12-14, 2009.
• Paul R. Messinger, Eleni Stroulia, Kelly Lyons, Michael Bone, Annie Niu, and Kristen Smirnov, and Stephen Perelgut, New Directions for Social Computing in Virtual Worlds: Applications for Business and Social Sciences, Decision Support Systems, Vol. 47, Issue 3, 2009, 204—228.
• Kelly Lyons, Corrie Playford, Paul R. Messinger, Run H. Niu, Eleni Stroulia, Business Models in Emerging Online Services, in Value Creation in E-Business Management, M. L. Nelson, M. J. Shaw, & T. J. Strader (Eds.), 15th Americas Conference on Information Systems, AMCIS 2009, SIGeBIZ track, San Francisco, California, August 2009, Selected Papers, 44-55.
• M. Mckenna, J. Slonim, M. McAllister, & K. Lyons, “Identification of Software System Components Using Semantic Models and Graph Slicing”, in, 4th International Conference on Software and Data Technologies, July 26-29, 2009.
• P. R. Messinger, X. Ge, E. Stroulia, K. Lyons, K. Smirnov, M. Bone, On the Relationship between My Avatar and Myself, Journal of Virtual Worlds Research: Consumer Behavior in Virtual Worlds, Vol. 1, No. 2, November 2008.

• H. M. Kim, K. Lyons, M. A. Cunningham, Towards a Theoretically-Grounded Framework for Evaluating Immersive Business Models and Applications: Analysis of Ventures in Second Life, Journal of Virtual Worlds Research: Past, Present and Future, Vol. 1, No. 1, July 2008.

• P. R. Messinger, E. Stroulia, K. Lyons, A Typology of Virtual Worlds: Historical Overview and Future Directions,Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2008.

• P. Kolari, T. Finin, K. Lyons, and Y. Yesha, Expert Search using Internal Corporate Blogs, In Proceedings, Workshop on Future Challenges in Expertise Retrieval, SIGIR 2008, July 2008.
• H. M. Kim, K. Lyons, M. A. Cunningham, Towards a Framework for Evaluating Immersive Business Models: Evaluating Service Innovations in Second Life, Proceedings of the 41st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Services Science Mini-Track, Jan 2008, 10 pages.

Patents

• Disclosure CA820060114 US, “Dependency Finder”, Filed November 2006 with M. McKenna, R. McKegney, J. Hawkins, D. Khusial, M. McAllister, and J. Slonim
  
• Disclosure CA820050346 US, “Detecting Privacy Risks in Software Applications: A Framework and Methodology”, Filed May 2006 with M. Smit, J. Hawkins, D. Khusial, M. McAllister, and J. Slonim.

Students

Current

John Peco	PhD Student	Faculty of Information, University of Toronto	Topic: The affect on organizations of social computing and the next generation of knowledge workers
Dejana Bajić	MSc Student	Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
Fan Dong	MSc Student	Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
Abayomi King	MSc Student	Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto

Past

2007	Mark McKenna	Masters	Computer Science, Dalhousie University	Co-Supervised with Jacob Slonim and Mike McAllister	Semantic Graphs in Support of Software Reverse Engineering
2006	Mike Smit	Masters	Computer Science, Dalhousie University	Co-Supervised with Jacob Slonim and Mike McAllister	Detecting Privacy Infractions in e-Commerce Software Applications: A Framework and Methodology	Currently a PhD student working with Eleni Stroulia in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Alberta

Graduate Student Committees

Starting 2009

Steve Szigeti

PhD

Faculty of Information, University of Toronto

Supervisor: Joan Cherry

Graduate Student Exam Committees

2009	Exam Committee Member, Wendy WenQian Liu, PhD Defence, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Refactoring-based Requirements Refinement Towards Design (Supervisor: Steve Easterbrook)
2009	Second Reader, Samira Abdi, MSc Candidate, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto Recovering Related Artifacts in Software Projects' History: a Comparison of Information Retrieval Based Methods (Supervisor: Greg Wilson)
2008	Exam Committee Member, Alvin Chin, PhD Defence, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Behavioural Model Fusion (Supervisor: Mark Chignell)
2008	Exam Committee Member, Shiva Netaji, PhD Defence, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Behavioural Model Fusion (Supervisor: Marsha Chechik)
2008	Exam Committee Member, Flavio Rizzolo, PhD Defence, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, DescribeX: A Framework for Exploring and Querying XML Web Collections (Supervisor: Renée Miller)
2007	Exam Committee Chair, Victor Muntes, PhD Defence, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Genetic Optimization for Large Join Queries (Supervisors: Josep-Larriba Pey and Marta Pérez Casany)
2005	Exam Committee Chair, Kien Huynh MSc Defence, York University, Analysis through Reflection: Walking the EMF Model of BPEL4WS (Supervisor: Franck van Breugel)
1999	Exam Committee Member, Xiaoyan Qian, MSc, York University, Design, Implementation and Performance Tests for Predicate Introduction - A Semantic Query Optimization Technique for Database Queries (Supervisor: Jarek Gryz)

Scholarly Service

• Service Science, a fully refereed and fast-track publication online journal, which is co-sponsored by the INFORMS Section on Service Science.
• Book Series: The Science of Service Systems (Book 1) and Service Systems Implementation (Book 2)

I currently serve in the following program committees:

• CASCON 2009
• 19th Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems, WITS 2009

I recently served on the following program committees:

• Service Cup 2009, co-located with the International Conference on Web Services 2009
• 2008 International Conference on Services Computing
• CASCON 2008

• 14th Americas Conference on Information Systems - Mini-Track on Virtual Worlds and Immersive Business
• IEEE Transaction on Software Engineering

Selected Presentations, Workshops, and Talks

• Wildcard Session co-organizer with M. Ratto (Lead), A. Clement, D. Phillips and S. Hockema, “Making and Doing: Critical Engagement Within Interdisciplinary iSchools”, at the iSociety: Research, Education, Engagement, Fourth iSchools Conference, February 8-11, 2009, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Workshop Presentation: “A Research Landscape for Service Science, Management, and Engineering Research”, at the Pre-ICIS (International Conference on Information Systems) SIGSVC (Special Interest Group on Services) Workshop, December 12, 2008, Paris, France.

• Workshop Co-Chair with P. Messinger, E. Stroulia, S. Perelgut, and H. Kim, Research Progress in Service Science, Management, and Engineering, October 28, 2008, CASCON 2008.
• Workshop Co-Chair with E. Yu, R. McKegney, E. Grundke, B. Lunt, Technology Curriculum for the Information Society, October 30, 2008, CASCON 2008.
• Invited Panelist, Information Systems and the Service Economy: A Multidimensional Perspective, The International Federation For Information Processing Working Group 8.2 Information Systems and Organizations (IFIP 8.2) Working Conference on IT and Change in the Service Economy--Challenges and Possibilities for the 21st Century, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, August 11, 2008.

• Invited Speaker, Consortium for Software Engineering Research (CSER), Spring 2008 Meeting, Embarking on a Research Program in Service Science, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, June 16, 2008.

• Invited Presentation, “Data Privacy in Electronic Commerce,” MITACS Network Information and Security Workshop, Feb. 8, 2006.

Teaching

An overview of my teaching philosophy can be found here.

In the winter of 2010, I will be teaching:

• INF1343: Introduction to Database Modeling and Design
• INF2040: Project Management

In the winter of 2009, I taught FIS1343 Introduction to Database Management and Design and FIS2306 Introduction to Service Science

In the fall of 2008, I taught two sections of FIS2301 Project Management

In the winter of 2008, I taught FIS2306 Introduction to Service Science which was based on that course.

In the winter of 2007, I co-taught (with Ross McKegney) COSC6002R Introduction to Service Science, Management, and Engineering, a graduate course in York University's Department of Computer Science and Engineering.

Committees and Service

• Colloquia Committee, Faculty of Information, 2009-2010
• Masters of Information Committee, Faculty of Information, 2009-2010

Positions Currrently Held

• Cross-appointed to the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto.

• Member, Knowledge Media Design Institute (KMDI)

• IBM Toronto Lab CAS Faculty Fellow

• Member of the Board of Management of the Ontario Centres of Excellence Centre for Communication and Information Technology

• Adjunct Professor, Dalhousie University Faculty of Computer Science

• Adjunct Professor, York University Department of Computer Science and Engineering

• Member of the ACM and recently elected 2008 Member-at-Large of ACM Council

• Member, Executive Committee, ACM Women (ACM-W), Appointed February 2009

• Member, ACM Grace Murray Hopper Awards Committee, Appointed December 2007 to December 2010 (Chair of Committee in 2009)

Personal Interests and Other Information

• I am very interested in promoting technology and computing to young women and have given many presentations to young people about the exciting careers available to them in information technology. I am a member of the University of Toronto Department of Computer Science Women in Computer Science community.

• I'm a member of the Executive of my Swim Club where I play the role of Secretary (North York Masters Aquatic Club or North York Gators). I practise as often as I can with the team and compete when possible.

• Besides swimming, I enjoy yoga, cooking, and hanging out with my friends.

• I love spending time in the most beautful place in the world (FortFrances and Rainy Lake). Check out an example of a Rainy Lake Sunset. Some time ago, I wrote a letter to the editor of the Fort Frances Times about my concern over the new Library project in Fort Frances. Good news!! The Fort Frances Library and Technology Centre project is going ahead!

• I live in North America's first planned community, the lovely Don Mills (check out the Shops) with my husband (Donny), two wonderful children (Andrew and Hazel), one dog (Woody), and one cat (Nelson). Our other cat Smokey died on Feb. 6, 2008.