Kecheng Liu

Professor Kecheng Liu is Fellow of British Computer Society, Fellow of Charted Institute of Management, and Senior Fellow of Higher Education Academy. He is a full professor and holds a chair of Informatics and E-Business in Henley Business School, University of Reading. He is currently Henley Business School Director for Strategic Initiatives. He is the founding Head of School of Business Informatics, Systems and Accounting (2011 - 2016) which consists of several cognate subject areas: business informatics, systems, accounting and financial management. He also founded and is the Director of Informatics Research Centre. During his academic career in British universities for more than 20 years, he has played a numerous leadership roles such as director academic programmes at the Masters and PhD levels, and head of school; and served in the University Senate since 2002. He has taught courses in business informatics, information management and systems, and digital strategy and leadership at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, including MBA and EMBA.

As an internationally renowned scholar in organisational semiotics and business informatics, more than 50 PhD students have graduated under his supervision. His research interests and publications span from organisational semiotics, requirements studies, enterprise information systems management and engineering, business processing modelling, business-IT alignment, co-design of business and IT systems, pervasive informatics and intelligent spaces for working and living. Kecheng Liu is visiting professor in several universities in China (Renmin University, Beijing Institute of Technology, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, and Beijing Jiaotong University).

Please see the following links for his publications:

PhD research opportunity with Professor Kecheng Liu:

Please visit the "PhD Opportunity" tab for more information.

New book published in December 2014:

Organisational Semiotics and Business Informatics. Routledge. ISBN 9780415823562. Available for purchasing from Amazon

New book published in December 2014

·         Organisational Semiotics and Business Informatics. Routledge. ISBN 9780415823562

·         Available for purchasing from Amazon

Teaching Business informatics for MSc in Information Management (with specialisms of Big Data in Business, Business Analysis and Service Design, and Systems Analysis and Design), MSc in Business Technology Consulting, all based in Reading; MSc in Management Information Systems, based in Ghana; and MSc Informatics, based in Beijing.

Papers: 

Books:

PhD supervised and graduated:

Digital visualisation is a way of representing data, ranging from a simple form of visual display to a complex interactive animation. The boom in big data has triggered broad use of digital visualization in a variety of domains from, e.g. marketing, finance to healthcare. There are various approaches in realising data visualisation. A well-designed interactive visualisation underpinned by data mining and other analytical capabilities can help the user gain knowledge effectively and support decision-making.

Semiotics is a formal doctrine of signs introduced by Peirce back in the 1930’s. Organisational semiotics places emphasis on the effective use of information in business context. Data, under the study through visualisation, are signs. Organisational semiotics can serve as a theoretical foundation for the research in digital visualisation when pursuing questions such as data availability, access, format (data itself and display format); and particularly meaning (i.e. interpretation), purpose of data presented, and effect of visualised data on the recipients.

This PhD project aims at a key process of scientific inquiry in data visualisation, or a process of knowledge generation from a semiotic perspective. The project can be conducted from several angles, e.g. the conceptualisation as a semiotic process in digital visualisation, and mechanisms for visualisation in a dashboard allowing interactive data analytics and decision-making. High quality, interested applicants are welcome to get in touch with Prof. Liu by sending initial outlines together with CV, transcripts and other supporting documents.

The project aims to address key issues in health and medical service industry and to provide decision support for management of medical service in China. It involves the development and deployment of medical and health cloud database and platforms, to integrate the information resources of public health, basic medical care, basic medical service quality, measure of drug use, medical insurance and others. The project will reserach into the interconnection, sharing and optimal allocation of information resources in the urban and rural, medical and health institutions, and public health agencies and relevant authorities, to offer sulutions to improve the health service systems at the national, regional and district levels. Emerging technologies such mobile health, cloud computing and big data analytics will be used to build a platform for extending the quality services to provincial and rural areas.

As the ICT theme leader, I am responsible for leading the team to investigate the use of ICT to enhance the competitiveness of Kazakh energy value network. The team also explores the role of ICT, particularly 3rd platform technologies such as cloud and mobile technologies in developing the resilience and competitiveness of Kazakh business ecosystems through economic diversification and digitization.  

KTP projects