Wright State management information systems honored for data mining project

Wright State students Christopher Broach, left, Ryan Murphy and Madison Willis, not pictured, won Technology First’s Award of Excellence in the Student Project category. They were mentored by Amir Zadeh, right, associate professor of information systems and supply chain management.

A team of three Wright State University management information systems students has won a regional award for their project — a way to predict the popularity of smart devices that talk to each other through the internet.

Ryan Murphy, Christopher Broach and Madison Willis won Technology First’s Award of Excellence in the Student Project category. Technology First is a Dayton-area group of information technology and related companies.

The Wright State team worked under the mentorship of Amir Zadeh, Ph.D., associate professor of information systems and supply chain management.

“This is a well-respected IT organization in the greater Dayton region,” he said of Technology First. “This recognizes the students’ innovation and IT leadership.”

Zadeh said he is proud of his students. “They did excellent work,” he said. “They are deserving of this recognition.”

The students will receive their award at the Technology First Leadership Awards event on Nov. 16 at the Sinclair Conference Center.

Their project focused on the Internet of Things, which includes devices such as video doorbell systems and personal health monitoring wearables — things that collect information and send it to a database.

“When a team of developers wants to make a device that fits into the Internet of Things, they put the project on a website that’s open for people to be viewed and garner likes,” said Broach, a senior who expects to graduate in May with a bachelor’s degree in management information systems and a certificate in business analytics. “Our project gathered data to try to predict how popular those projects would be. We used data mining methods to analyze data.”

He added, “The advantage of knowing what leads to a project being popular is a greater empowerment to the developers. If you’re making a device, you want it to be accepted by users.  You empower developers with feedback to make better projects, and potentially develop a more valuable project for the users.”

Murphy, who graduated in the spring of 2022 with a bachelor’s degree in management information systems, said of the team’s project: “It’s a better way of determining what’s hot and what’s not.”

Murphy, who now works as a contract specialist at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base,  said it’s an honor to receive an Award of Excellence from Technology First.

“A lot of the credit goes to Dr. Zadeh for promoting it,” Murphy said. “He really did a lot for us.”

Broach described the honor as both validating and motivating.

“It’s a recognition of the things we’ve done,” he said. “It makes me appreciate Dr. Zadeh and what Wright State has done with the (MIS) program.”

Willis, who earned her bachelor’s degree in management information systems in 2020 and her master’s degree in information systems in 2021, said just being nominated for the award was “super exciting.” She now is a business analyst for Collins Aerospace in Troy.

She also had high praise for Dr. Zadeh: “He made me believe I can be a data analyst. Having him as my master’s mentor meant a lot to me.”

Of the trio, Zadeh said, “I’m proud of them. They did excellent work. They are deserving of this recognition.”