Many SoC students would know Assistant Professor Atreyi Kankanhalli as their lecturer in Electronic Government, Information Organisation and other information systems modules. But beyond the lecture theatre on campus, Dr Kankanhalli may be better known as the scholar who scored a first for Singapore at the prestigious International Conference of Information Systems (ICIS) in 2003.
At the conference, Dr Kankanhalli’s PhD research clinched the ACM SIGMIS Best Doctoral Dissertation Award, the top award for PhD research in information systems. Her dissertation, “Understanding Contribution and Seeking Behaviour in Electronic Knowledge Repositories”, is not only a work of scholarship, but also a study of practical implications for organisations seeking to deploy their knowledge resources more effectively. It outshone the research of students from leading universities worldwide to win the coveted prize.
 

Since the award was set up some 20 years ago, it was the first time that the award was given to a student dissertation from a Singapore university. Previous winning dissertations came from universities such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).