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Approved: Joint health informatics degree

June 9, 2011

health informaticsThe 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.

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Resnick announces new health informatics initiatives at national forum

June 7, 2011

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.

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Symposium to look at preservation education

June 1, 2011

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.

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Mei’s NSF grant to refine language models

May 3, 2011

Qiaozhu MeiAssistant 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.

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SI Commencement: A day for beginning

May 2, 2011

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.

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Milavec, Bakshy win teaching awards

April 29, 2011

MSI student Miquelle Milavec and doctoral student Eytan Bakshy received this year’s Yahoo! Student Teaching Awards at the School of Information. Both graduate student instructors will be recognized and received a $500 stipend at the annual Research Celebration at 2 p.m. Monday, May 2 in the Ehrlicher Room, 3100 North Quad.

Miquelle Milavec

Eytan Bakshy

The Yahoo! Student Teaching Award recognizes two graduate students who demonstrate exemplary dedication, enthusiasm, technical expertise, and communication skills as graduate student instructors (GSIs). Yahoo! initiated these awards in 2009 as a means of recognizing outstanding students who exhibit the highest degree of excellence in teaching.

Graduate students teaching courses and/or serving as GSIs at the School of Information during the fall and winter terms of each academic year are eligible for the awards.

Milavec received the Yahoo! Students’ Choice Award for teaching in SI 110. Undergraduate and graduate students based their selection on the instructor who exhibited the highest degree of excellence in teaching.

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Veinot paper earns “outstanding” plaudit

April 18, 2011

Assistant Professor Tiffany Veinot has received the “2011 Outstanding Paper Award” from the Tiffany VeinotJournal of Documentation for her paper, “A Multilevel Model of HIV/AIDS Information/Help Network Development.” The honor, awarded by the journal’s editors, named the paper as the best published in the journal in the past year.

The Journal of Documentation is a top-ranked information science journal, and the key journal for publishing theoretical advances in the discipline. The paper is the first to describe and explain an understudied type of information behavior: information/help network development at individual, group and institutional levels. As such, it models the complex dynamics that make individual acts of interpersonal information acquisition and sharing possible.

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Cast your ballot for your favorite GSI

April 13, 2011

Voting has started to select two outstanding graduate student instructors (GSI) at the School of Information for teaching awards from Yahoo!

Yahoo! initiated the annual awards in 2009. Two GSIs who have demonstrated exemplary dedication, enthusiasm, technical expertise, and communication skills will be selected. Nominations are due Tuesday, April 19. The awards are:

  • Yahoo! Students’ Choice Award — All GSIs from SI who taught this past fall or winter semester are eligible for a Yahoo! Students’ Choice Award. Undergraduate and graduate students are asked to nominate the GSI who exhibits the highest degree of excellence in teaching. Students are also asked to provide a brief statement about the nominee with their vote. Students are asked to vote here.
  • Yahoo! Innovative Teaching with Technology Award — SI faculty have nominated two GSIs, Eytan Bakshy and Jude Yew, based on their innovative use of technology in the classroom. Undergraduate and graduate students who had Eytan for SI 182 (winter) and/or Jude for SI 422 (winter) are asked to vote and to provide a brief statement about why the GSI should receive the award. Students in these two courses will receive the URL for voting by e-mail.

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Categories: Faculty, Students

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Robert Frost memorial set for Friday

April 12, 2011

Friends and colleagues of the late Robert Frost are invited to a memorial service at 3 p.m. Friday, April 15 in the Michigan Union Rogel Ballroom.

Frost, an associate professor at the School of Information, died Saturday, March 26 after a lengthy fight against cancer.

Many former students and friends have asked how they can honor him. The family has asked that in lieu of flowers, contributions be made in the following ways:

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Resnick, colleagues win prestigious ACM software award

April 7, 2011

Paul ResnickThe Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has announced that Professor Paul Resnick and his collaborators have won the 2010 Software System Award for their GroupLens Collaborative Filtering Recommender Systems, which showed how a distributed set of users could receive personalized recommendations by sharing ratings, leading to both commercial products and extensive research.

The Software System Award is given annually to an institution or individuals recognized for developing software systems that have had a lasting influence, reflected in contributions to concepts and/or commercial acceptance. The award is based on work that Resnick and his group produced in the early to mid-1990s. (more…)

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