13 January 2022 – Provost’s Chair Professor Atreyi Kankanhalli has won the AIS Fellow Award 2021, a prestigious award given by the Association for Information Systems (AIS) to academics in the Information Systems (IS) discipline.
The AIS Fellow Award recognises individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the IS discipline in terms of research, teaching and service. A Fellow is expected to have made significant global contributions, as well as local contributions in the context of their country and region.
Each year, at most eight individuals from around the world have received the prestigious award since it first began in 1999.
Prof Kankanhalli was recognised in part for her many valuable contributions to research on online communities and digital collaboration. Specifically, her research has focused on improving participation and outcomes in a variety of online communities, such as those for knowledge management, e-commerce, social networks, e-government, and more recently, healthcare, including fitness communities. Her work on fostering collaboration extends to interactions between humans and intelligent systems.
Prof Kankanhalli is also interested in improving digital innovation through open innovation communities involving customers and the crowd. Her research identifies enablers and barriers to participation that is necessary to make these communities successful. Her research has been published in premium journals, and has been highly cited.
Apart from research, Prof Kankanhalli also teaches various IS policy-related courses at NUS Computing. These include industry-relevant courses on topics such as cybersecurity policy, as well as a course on technologies for regulation and compliance, which is the only course of its kind. Her research articles have also been used in IS courses at various universities worldwide, such as McGill University, and Carnegie Mellon University.
Prof Kankanhalli also finds it fulfilling to work on promoting IS research and teaching in the region as the AIS Vice President for the Asia Pacific region. She has also chaired the major international and regional conferences in the field, the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), and the Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems (PACIS) respectively.
“My editorial work for leading journals in the field such as the MIS Quarterly is also rewarding, as I help to shape the type and quality of research that is published in these prestigious journals,” she said.
“I feel very honoured and delighted to receive this award. It is a great recognition of my work by the global community in the IS discipline. Since 1999, when I started my PhD in this area, I have been aiming to do meaningful work in IS research, teaching, and service. So, this feels great as a recognition of all the time and effort put in! At the same time, I want to thank the NUS Computing Department of Information Systems and Analytics, my colleagues, collaborators, students, and mentors for being very supportive of my work,” said Prof Kankanhalli.
