Mentor: Francesco Lelli

External supervisor: Javed Khan

Business Needs

1. Improving the visibility of data in a global manufacturer’s head office. Current businesses have a plethora of data and analytics, critical for strategic, tactical and operational decision-making. Interactive displays in an office can support that decision making process. For this assignment you will investigate user needs of senior management in Sappi’s head office. Based on that investigation you will design and implement dashboards to be displayed in a high-tech interactive display in Sappi’s head office in Brussels, Belgium.
2. Improving everyday work-related chores. In this assignment you will investigate how office workers deal with IT systems for completing chores such as filling expenses. Based on that investigation you will propose a system to make such processes more efficient.

The Horizon Europe funding creates opportunities for Sappi to both fund and solve, through collaborations with other complementing organizations. However, in our experience in trying to partner with other organizations to pursue funding on digital initiatives, we have found a luck of detailed use-cases, which would the basis of filtering the proposed calls for funding.

Main Activities

• Conduct user research such as interviews and contextual inquiry.
• Qualitative and quantitative analysis.
• Design of dashboards for semi-public, interactive displays.
• Implementation of dashboards for semi-public, interactive displays.
• Investigation of modern IT systems.

Success Metrics

1. Dashboards are user-friendly and informative,
2. User findings are thorough, actionable and convincing,
3. Suggestions for improvements are actionable and convincing,
4. student’s attitude: quick response time, proactiveness and independence.

Company and Team

The internship will take place within the Digital Transformation (DT) team of Sappi Europe, in Brussels, Belgium.

Sappi is a global company focused on providing dissolving pulp, paper pulp, paper-based and biorefinery solutions to its customers in over 150 countries. Headquartered in Brussels, Belgium, Sappi Europe is the leading European producer and supplier of coated fine paper, packaging and specialty papers.

More about the company at: https://www.sappi.com/

Company coach

Dr.ir. Javed Khan is Head of UX in Sappi. Furthermore, he serves as an associate editor at the Behavior and Information Technology journal. Javed holds a PhD. and a P.D.Eng. degree from Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) and a MSc. in Computer Engineering from the University of Patras. In the past he held the position (tenured) of assistant professor at TU/e’s department of Industrial Design and before that of senior lecturer at Breda University of Applied Sciences. Finally, he gained industrial R&D experience, in design and HCI research positions, at Philips Research, Vodafone and Greece’s Computer Technology Institute.

More about the coach at: http://khan.gr/

Master #thesis in #DigitalTransformation in SAPPI: a global manufacturer of sustainable materials at TiU.
Share on X

For a complete list of available thesis please visit the following link:
https://francescolelli.info/thesis/

The post Digital Transformation in SAPPI: a global manufacturer of sustainable materials appeared first on Francesco Lelli.

Mentor: Francesco Lelli

This thesis is about trying to answering the following questions: “what is a good research paper?” or “is this publication worth reading?” before reading the paper.

Nowadays the amount of scientific journals is overwhelming and constantly increasing. Students, as well as senior scientists, are facing an impossible amount of information to elaborate. Consequently, they are force to apply a set of heuristics for selecting the information to process and consume. This approach force the scholar in forming an opinion prior a proper read of the scientific article. This is “by definition” a bias that may be misleading.

You will investigate how scholars implement in an explicit or implicit manner these heuristics.  You will also devise best practices and computer driven tools that could help improve the efficiency of the selection process of scientific articles.

 If you are curious and you what to know more about the topic, I recommend you the following:

• Read this article about my personal heuristics for understanding if a paper is worth reading.
• A generic article in Wikipedia about Heuristics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristics_in_judgment_and_decision-making
• A few keywords that you may want to use in google scholar: Heuristics and Bias, Heuristics in decision making, Heuristics in information management, Heuristics in software engineering.

This project does not involve an internship. Instead, it will try to have a high academic relevance and theoretical contribution and, based on the quality of your work the candidate may be able to publish the results in the proceedings and scientific journals.

You may propose a qualitative or quantitative approach for validating the claims that you will be making in your thesis.

The ideal candidate is a self started go-getter student that like to see things thru and do not limit himself to take facts for granted.

If this topic trigger your intellectual curiosity, just get in touch with me

The post Heuristics for pre-selecting scientific works appeared first on Francesco Lelli.

Mentor: Bert-Jan Butijn, Second Reader: Francesco Lelli

Blockchain technology (BCT), also referred to as distributed ledger technology, is currently regarded as one of the most important technological developments. The locus of this pervasive technology is the increasing attention towards deploying blockchain technology to carry out transactions during business processes. Transactions that are carried out during a business process can be executed in a more effective and secure fashion, using the beneficial properties of blockchain technology such as the transparency (tamperproof) and immutability of transaction records stored on the blockchain.

Because of these properties, BCT offers a way to execute processes in a trustworthy manner even in a network without any mutual trust between nodes. Furthermore, the parties involved in the transaction can rely on the blockchain technology to guarantee that transactions are carried out and transaction records can be regarded as trustworthy, there is no longer a need for a trusted third party to carry out these transactions.

The absence of a third party in a process reduces the transaction costs between parties because there is no brokerage fee that needs to be paid for handling the transaction. As such, BCT offers the potential of faster business process execution whilst greatly reducing compliance costs. Therefore the adoption of BCT for business processes could accumulate to a significant reduction of costs for firms. Yet, little is known about the full strategic potential of BCT.

For your master thesis we expect you to study this strategic potential. This means that you will be conducting interviews at various firms that are currently using BCT, or are in the phase of exploring its strategic potential. We expect that you have some prior experience with, and skills in conducting interviews. Besides these skills you speak and write fluent English.

This project does not involve an internship. Instead, it will try to have a high academic relevance and theoretical contribution and, based on the quality of your work the candidate may be able to publish the results in the proceedings and scientific journals.

For More information contacts:

Bert-Jan Butijn or Francesco Lelli.

The post Strategic Value of Blockchain Technology: Thesis Proposal appeared first on Francesco Lelli.