SIRCA I PI Wins the Prestigious “Börje Langefors Best Doctoral Dissertation Award” in Sweden

Dr. M. Sirajul Islam, one of the Principal Investigators of SIRCA I, won the “Börje Langefors second best doctoral dissertation award” (or Börje Langeforspriset in Swedish)  in Informatics/Information Systems in Sweden for the year 2011 from the Swedish Academy of Information Systems (Svenska informationssystemakademin, sisa-net.se). The title of his dissertation is “Creating Opportunity by Connecting the Unconnected: Deploying Mobile Phone based Agriculture Market Information Service for Farmers in Bangladesh”, which was supported by SIRCA during the period 2009 and 2010. This award was conferred on May 9, 2012 in a befitting manner during the annual conference of the Academy hosted at the Linkoping University, Sweden.

Börje Langefors Award is a prestigious academic honor awarded each year by SISA for the best doctoral dissertation in Sweden in the study areas -informatics, information systems, Data and Information Science or equivalent. The prize aims to reward as well as encourage development of high standard research in Sweden, and to demonstrate exemplary research in informatics.

The motivation for the award conferred to Sirajul as stated: “Sirajul Islam‘s dissertation reports a design-oriented action research project that sought to create sustainable societal effects by facilitating mobile technology adoption. One interesting aspect of this change effort is that it nicely illustrates how informatics research can help underprivileged groups to strengthen their positions through innovative IT use. The research project was executed through a well-designed process that is presented in a comprehensive yet detailed way. In particular, it reveals how and why certain practical and theoretical issues were tackled to push the project forward. Constituting the core of the thesis, the set of articles suggests that the result produced were not only locally relevant but also globally impactful.”  The dissertation can be downloaded from http://oru.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2:440147

Dr. Siraj is a member of the ICT for development (ICT4D) research group at the Informatics department of Örebro University. He has several research publications in the area of ICT4D and eGovernment published in reputed international journals and conferences. He is serving as a reviewer and program committee member for some international journals and conferences related to ICT4D and eGovernment research.   Dr. Siraj is presently working as an Assistant Professor in Informatics at the Örebro University, Sweden and Co-ordinating the ‘International Network for Postgraduate Students in the Area of ICT4D (IPID)’.