Patrick Wessa
My research is located at the Leuven Institute for Research on Information Systems (LIRIS), University of Leuven, Belgium. I am teaching Statistics and Information Management to Business students (two undergraduate courses and one course in the preparatory programme).
Research Interests
I am mostly interested in multidisciplinary research which is located in the intersection between Statistics, Database Technology, Research & Education. Here are a few examples:
- reproducible research based on innovative databases/repositories (though I prefer the term "reproducible computing")
- reproducible & collaborative writing (actually I think of this as a part of "reproducible computing")
- constructivist, educational technology (Computer Assisted Learning and Technology Enhanced Learning)
- applied statistics (incl. reproducible statistical computing, econometrics, and time series analysis)
- software & database design, engineering, and development
- technology acceptance, usability and evaluation of ICT
- educational & research technology
- ...
In summary, I am interested in multidisciplinary, scientific questions from (almost) any field that can be studied through solid, reproducible statistics and innovative information technology.
Active Projects
Here you find a list of some of my projects:
- Combining OLAP & OLTP Databases in medical information systems
- Statistical Software based on the R Framework: www.wessa.net
- Statistical, Reproducible Computing Repository: www.freestatistics.org (here you can find a list of some papers)
- Resources about Statistics - Econometrics - Forecasting: www.xycoon.com
- Reproducible Computing for Large & Complex Datasets: currently under construction (see www.freestatistics.net)
- RFC: an innovative Virtual Learning Environment which is content-centered rather than course-centered (the URL of the RFC home page is rfc.wessa.net). If you are wondering why this makes any difference, feel free to read about it here and here.
Work in progress
Here you find a list of some papers that are under development:
- Wessa P, Holliday IE (2012) Does Reviewing Lead to Better Learning and Decision Making? Answers from a Randomized Stock Market Experiment. PLoS ONE 7(5): e37719. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0037719 (status: recently published)
- Discourse Analysis of Peer Reviews within a Social Networking Paradigm (status: data cleaning)
- Reviewing Peer Reviews: A Model based on Reproducible Computing (status: statistical analysis)
- Social Interaction and Learning: Freeriding or Construction of Knowledge? (status: data collection)
- Fraud Detection in Collaborative Writing (status: data collection)
- Football Attendances: a near perfect prediction model (status: submitted)
- Technology Acceptance of Learning Technology (status: submitted)
- Scientific Collaboration in Neuroscience: A Business Model for Data Sharing and Federated Computing (status: literature research)
Contact Information
You can contact me through e-mail: patrick at wessa dot net
Short Bio
If you are looking for a short bio, here's a text that might be useful in publications:
Patrick Wessa is an information scientist & statistician (PhD, Institute for Statistics and Econometrics, University of Basel, CH) with a strong interest in information technologies. His research is located at the Leuven Institute for Research on Information Systems (LIRIS, University of Leuven, Belgium) and is mainly focused on multidisciplinary, scientific questions that can be studied through reproducible statistics and information technology. His innovations have been made freely accessible through a series of web applications that have become increasingly popular among academics and have been cited in a large number of scholarly articles. In recent years, he disseminated his findings through a variety of publication outlets in the domains of software engineering (IJ of Computers, Communication and Control), statistics (Computational Statistics), education (J of E-Learning), and multidisciplinary science (PLoS ONE).