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.
The annual School of Information Research Celebration will take place at 2 p.m. Monday, May 2 in the Ehrlicher Room, 3100 North Quad. Doug Van Houweling, associate dean for research and innovation, will present the 2010-11 annual report, highlights of current research projects, and a preview of what’s ahead in 2011-12. The event will also include the presentation of the Yahoo! Student Teaching Awards to two Ph.D. students. A dessert reception will follow.
The 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…)
Gabriel Krieshok (left), Steve Jackson (second from right) and Alex Pompe (right) receive their Best Paper award from iConference co-chairs Harry Bruce (U-Washington) and Jonathan Grudin of Microsoft.
Assistant Professor Steven J. Jackson and MSI students Alex Pompe and Gabriel Krieshok took home a Best Paper Award from the annual iConference in Seattle, Washington, this month. “Things Fall Apart: Maintenance, Repair, and Technology for Education Initiatives in Rural Namibia” explores what has up until now been a peripheral issue in the field of information and communication technology development (ICTD) – namely, the challenges of repairing and maintaining computer infrastructure in the developing world.
The three authors are collaborating researchers on the Nambia and Madagascar ICT4D Fieldwork project. This particular paper grew from fieldwork in northeastern Namibia during summer 2010. Pompe spent two years in Namibia as an education and IT development volunteer in the Peace Corps. Krieshok served as an educator and trainer in the Peace Corps in Madagascar.
Pompe also serves as the Peace Corps coordinator for the University of Michigan. Krieshok is president of the School of Information Student Association.
The iConference is sponsored by the iSchools organization, which consists of 31 information schools in eight countries. This year’s conference received approximately 300 submissions, of which 50 were selected for presentation.
Photo credit: Alex Pompe
Assistant Professor Qiaozhu Mei has just been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant for his project “Eyes of the Foreseer: Integrative and In Situ Information Retrieval and Mining in Online Communities.”
CAREER grants are the most prestigious awards given by the NSF to junior faculty who “exemplify the role of teacher-scholar through outstanding research, excellent education, and the integration of education and research within the mission of their organizations.”
The four-year, $449,531 award will allow Mei to develop the Foreseer, a user-centric tool that will collect data from online communities for information analysis. With the growth of online communities, the Web has evolved from networks of shared documents to networks of knowledge-sharing groups and individuals. A vast amount of heterogeneous yet interrelated information is being generated for which existing information analysis techniques are inadequate. Current tools often neglect the actual creators and consumers of information, and as a result, the findings are only useful to data analysts.
If you’ve ever wondered what a digital “textbook” would look like in the future, the Open.Michigan group has something in mind that will appeal to you.
The Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the U-M Medical School would like to create the medical textbook of the future. The department is particularly interested in having SI students flex their design and innovation skills to help Open.Michigan and the Medical School’s Learning Resource Center with the project. Emily Puckett Rodgers, an SI alumna and open education coordinator with Open.Michigan, wants you to lend your perspectives, skills, expertise, and interests to shape this project for the educational opportunities of the 21st century.
Open.Michigan will host two design jams with the goal of transforming this idea into a reality. They will be from 5:30-8 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 13 and Thursday, Jan. 20 in the Taubman Medical Library, 1135 E. Catherine St., room 3901. Dinner will be provided. An RSVP is requested.
To get you started, the sponsors suggest you ponder these questions:
This design jam will bring together students, faculty, and staff from across U-M. This event is an opportunity to apply some course concepts to a real opportunity with a small time commitment. There may also be opportunities for continued involvement in the project.
Beth St. Jean, Soo Young Rieh,
Elaine Toms (conference co-cochair), and Ji Yeon Yang
Associate Professor Soo Young Rieh and doctoral students Yong-Mi Kim, Ji Yeon Yang, and Beth St. Jean received the 2010 American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) Best Paper Award at the organization’s annual meeting in Pittsburgh on Oct. 26. Their paper, “A Diary Study of Credibility Assessment in Everyday Life Information Activities on the Web: Preliminary Findings,” appeared in the Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 2010.
This was the first year that ASIS&T made the Best Paper Award to recognize the best research paper presented at its conference.
SI faculty and staff are eligible to submit proposals for the Computers and Writing Conference sponsored by the Sweetland Writing Center in North Quad. The theme of the conference is “Writing in Motion: Traversing Public/Private Spaces.”
The conference, slated for May 19-22, will explore how people are using new technologies to write in ways that never before were possible and even to redefine what “writing” is. Proposals are due Nov. 15, and participants should plan to use relevant technology in their presentations.
If you have an idea for a mobile app, you ought to consider submitting it to the Innovation Challenge competition at the University. Submissions are due Nov. 30.
Suggested categories for apps are:
All U-M students, faculty, and staff are eligible to participate. Teams are encouraged to enter. The contest is sponsored by U-M Information and Technology Services, Technology Transfer, Apple, and Google.
Check out the Innovation Challenge website for more details.
The 2010 IEEE Great Lakes Technology Symposium (GLTS) will take place on Sept. 16-17 in Ann Arbor. GLTS brings together federal funding agencies, academia, tech-transfer offices, the high-tech business community, business accelerator, and the investment community. The aim of the symposium is to educate academia and the technology companies on federal funding trends and facilitate dialog among the participants on technology transfer and commercialization.
