Please note that news items for the School of Information are maintained on the SI website under News & Events.
Approved: Joint health informatics degree
Posted June 9, 2011 by UMSI MonthlyCategories: Faculty
The Presidents Council of the State Universities of Michigan has approved the Master of Health Informatics degree that SI and the School of Public Health will offer jointly.
The first class of full-time MHI students will begin their studies in fall 2012. Students working toward a health informatics certificate will begin this coming fall.
“This new degree is very exciting,” said Dean Jeff MacKie-Mason. “There are few social problems as pressing and costly, at home and abroad, as those in health.
Tiffany Chow wins Braverman prize
Posted June 7, 2011 by Glenda BullockCategories: Students
Tags: Braverman prize
MSI HCI student Tiffany Chow has won the Progressive Librarians Guild Miriam Braverman Memorial Prize with her essay “Design Implications: How space can transform the library and its public.”
The prize is awarded annually to the best paper about some aspect of the social responsibilities of librarians, libraries, or librarianship. The Progressive Librarians Guild provides “a forum for the open exchange of radical views on library issues.”
Tiffany’s winning essay will be published in the summer 2011 edition of Progressive Librarian Journal. She also receives a stipend to attend the American Library Association meeting this month in New Orleans.
A former youth development worker in New York’s Spanish Harlem, Tiffany studies the effects of accessibility to information in communities of color.
Kathleen Fear awarded 2011 Zipf Fellowship
Posted June 7, 2011 by Glenda BullockCategories: Fellowships, Students
Tags: Zipf Fellowship
SI Ph.D. candidate Kathleen Fear has been selected to receive the highly competitive A. R. Zipf Fellowship in Information Management for 2011 awarded by the Council on Library and Information Resources. Kathleen holds a bachelor’s in physics from Yale University and a master’s in information, with a specialization in the preservation of information, from the School of Information at the University of Michigan.
Kathleen’s research focuses on how scientific data can best be preserved, managed, and accessed. Recently, she conducted a major study with co-PI and fellow SI PhD candidate Devan Donaldson, exploring the use of provenance metadata in the ProteomeCommons repository, a major data archive for proteomics research. Her study found that “proteomics researchers rely on far more information than just the available metadata when finding and evaluating data for reuse: the repository structure itself was an important source of information, particularly the contextualization provided by linking datasets to the papers they were associated with.” Read the rest of this post »
Resnick announces new health informatics initiatives at national forum
Posted June 7, 2011 by Glenda BullockCategories: Events, Faculty
Tags: health informatics
Professor Paul Resnick will announce the 2011 launch of the new health informatics certificate program on Thursday, June 9, at approximately 10:15 a.m., at the Health Data Initiative Forum of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies in Bethesda, Maryland. He will also announce the new master of health informatics degree, which is expected to be approved by the Presidents Council, State Universities of Michigan later this month and enroll its first class in 2012. Both the certificate program and the master’s degree are joint programs of the School of Information and the School of Public Health.
For those interested in viewing the forum, all morning plenary sessions will be streamed live between 9 a.m. and noon in Space 2435 of North Quad. A continental breakfast will be provided at 8:30 a.m. The public is invited to attend for all or part of the video presentation.
RSVP to Meghan Genovese, health information program manager, at meghang@umich.edu.
Symposium to look at preservation education
Posted June 1, 2011 by UMSI MonthlyCategories: Faculty, Research
Faculty members in archives and preservation from institutions in the United States and Canada will come to the School of Information next week to discuss the future of their fields in the digital age.
“At the Nexus of Analog and Digital: A Symposium for Preservation Educators” is a by-invitation event sponsored by the School of Information with support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. It will run from June 5-7 on campus.
SI alum scores again with mobile app
Posted May 10, 2011 by Glenda BullockCategories: Alumni, Entrepreneurs
Prolific application developer Hung Truong (MSI ’09) continues to earn distinction in the semi-annual University of Michigan Mobile Apps Challenge. The spring 2011 winners were just announced, and Hung was runner-up with his new app, Mapskrieg.
Mapskrieg was developed for the iPad, and marries Google maps with Craigslist, allowing users to search for items geographically. See a demo.
Truong works part-time as an application programmer at North Quad. Last fall, he was named first runner-up with his Checkmate for Foursquare app. Enhancing the location-based social networking tool Foursquare, this iPhone app makes the check-in feature automatic when users visit their favorite venues. The app also allows users to share their check-ins on Facebook and Twitter.
While at SI, Truong and two fellow MSI students won the RPM Ventures annual contest that provides support to entrepreneurial start-ups for their company Troubadour Mobile. He continues to develop new applications independently.
The goal of the Mobile Apps competition is to promote entrepreneurial thinking and encourage the U-M community to develop innovative mobile applications.
SI alumnus Rick Wash to study crowdfunding
Posted May 9, 2011 by Glenda BullockCategories: Alumni, Grants
Rick Wash (Ph.D. ’09), assistant professor in the department of Telecommunications, Information Studies and Media and the School of Journalism at Michigan State University, has been awarded a National Science Foundation grant to explore technical problems in the area of “crowdfunding.”
Crowdfunding sites solicit members of the public to contribute small amounts of money for a particular cause. SI students utilized crowdfunding this year to raise funds for the Alternative Spring Break program on the site Crowdrise.com. Such sites are an example of a commonly studied problem called a “matching marketplace,” where two types of people come together to be matched according to some criteria. Other examples include job search sites and online dating sites.
This project brings together ideas from both computer science and economics. Both disciplines study matching problems, but neither has found a completely satisfactory solution in the presence of complementarities. Wash’s research will develop an understanding of the role of complementarities in both of these types of solutions and apply insights across fields to design better methods of matching.
The project will test these ideas in the real world by developing a crowdfunding system. Crowdfunding is increasingly being applied to fund high-quality professional journalism (on sites such as Spot.Us), and improved crowdfunding systems have the potential to be a new funding source for this struggling industry.
Mei’s NSF grant to refine language models
Posted May 3, 2011 by Glenda BullockCategories: Faculty, Grants
Tags: National Science Foundation
Assistant Professor Qiaozhu Mei has been awarded a two-year grant from the National Science Foundation to fund his project “Wordsmith in the Cloud: Refining Language Models Using Web-Scale Language Networks.”
The $214,985 award will fund the first attempt to refine language models with Web-scale language networks. The techniques will bridge the gap between cloud computing and text information management using language models. The developed techniques are also expected to solve challenging research problems, such as the construction of heterogeneous language networks from Web-scale corpora, the estimation of tie strengths in language networks, and the regularization of language models with multiple language networks.
Using the power of the Cloud, Qiaozhu and his team will be able to efficiently construct and manage the language networks from Web-scale corpora, steer the regularization framework and the refining processes with these Web-scale language networks, and apply the refined language models to real world text mining applications. The project will produce large scale language networks from a variety of contexts, including general corpora like the Web, domain-specific corpora like scientific literature and healthcare, and community-specific corpora corresponding to the online social communities.
A Ph.D. student and two master’s students from SI will gain valuable interdisciplinary analytic training while working with Qiaozhu on this project.
SI Commencement: A day for beginning
Posted May 2, 2011 by UMSI MonthlyCategories: Faculty, Students
With hundreds of friends and family looking on, graduates of the School of Information celebrated on Friday, April 29 at the Graduate Recognition Ceremony on campus in the Mendelssohn Theatre.
The ceremony included recognition for nine graduating doctoral students: Eytan Bakshy, Archer Batcheller, Eric Cook, Brian Hilligoss, Lian Jian, Cory Knobel, John Lin, Kevin Nam, and Maria Souden.
In his remarks addressing the Master of Science in Information and doctoral graduates, Dean Jeff MacKie-Mason noted that SI’s new graduates leave with a solid foundation based on educational attainment, service, and philanthropy. As examples, he noted the Service Day in January and Alternative Spring Break.
In the two years that most of the Master of Science in Information graduates were at SI, advances in social technology were rapid.
