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.

“There are huge opportunities for us to make a difference in people’s lives by designing, developing, and improving health information technologies and systems, health information analysis, and social interactions around health issues. This is a major thrust in our move to be the best iSchool in the world at socially engaged information and computing.”

Faculty, staff, and students worked for several years to bring this program into existence.

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’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.”

Named in honor of A. R. Zipf, a pioneer in information management systems, the $10,000 fellowship is awarded annually to a student who is enrolled in graduate school in the early stages of study and shows exceptional promise for leadership and technical achievement in information management.

While Kathleen is the first SI student to win this competitive fellowship award, she is the second University of Michigan graduate student to have done so. Dean Jeff MacKie-Mason’s student Terence Kelly won the award in 2001 while earning his PhD in computer science. Terence is now a researcher in the Exascale Computing Lab at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, CA.

See more information and the full list of previous fellowship recipients here.

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.

“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.

Associate Professor Paul Conway, who is coordinating the symposium, said the purpose of the symposium is exploring how to teach preservation in ways that acknowledge the heritage of analog preservation techniques and perspectives while pointing toward research and development initiatives in the digital sphere. An emphasis on preserving digital information, some of which is derived from and provides direct reference to original analog sources, could well be the future of preservation education. A focus on digital information also parallels attention within the cultural heritage community on the changing nature of preservation activities in an increasingly digital world.

“Our plenary talks will feature leading faculty whose scholarship engages preservation issues,” Conway said. “Each participant will share a brief position paper on one of the themes of the symposium, drawing on the priorities and activities within their respective academic environments.”

An outcome of the symposium will be an agenda for advancing research and doctoral-level graduate education that does not require a high level of administrative coordination for implementation. Because faculty are relatively autonomous within their school and departmental “boats,” the symposium may foster a shared sense of the value that might be achieved when faculty tend to “row in the same direction with similar pace and purpose.”

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.

Rick Wash

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.

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.

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.

“What an amazing time for you to be graduating with a degree in Information,” MacKie-Mason pointed out. “And what an amazing time to realize the impact you can have on the lives of others through your service. The information professions have always been in service. But as technology changes faster than social institutions and behaviors can keep up, we are all realizing that we have new power and new responsibility to make a difference, in new ways, throughout the world.”

The dean observed that SI graduates are in a unique position.

“All of you spent the past few years preparing to be information professionals who make a difference in the world. Your cross-disciplinary studies place you at the epicenter of people, information and technology. You are more capable than most to navigate the rising flood of information. You have acquired the tools to create a community of common access, in which information is freely shared to establish connections, build bridges, solve real-world problems, and make better and healthier lives.

“Dream big. Do good.”

A Time for Awards

In addition, three MSI students received awards. Colleen Theisen won the the Edmon Low Award, which was established by the Class of 1972 in honor of Professor Edmon Low upon his retirement. Fellow students selected Theisen in recognition of her dedication to service, empathy for others, confidence-building, industry, interpersonal acuity, responsibility, and humor.

Gabriel Krieshok, president of the School of Information Student Association, lauded Theisen. “She has demonstrated true character in her tenure at SI as a student leader, a graduate student instructor, and a fierce and loyal apologetic for information sciences and our discipline in general. I’ll add that she has done all of this while also this past year picking up the title of ‘mother’.”

Jessie Mannisto and Christine Murray won the Margaret Mann Award, as selected by the faculty. The award was established in 1938 by the University of Michigan Library Science Alumni Society in honor of Associate Professor Margaret Mann upon her retirement. The award recognizes academic honor, based upon demonstration of ability and promise of professional development.

While at SI, Mannisto participated in summer internships in the U-M library system and volunteered for two ASBs, at the National Science Foundation and the Library of Congress. She has also been active in student organizations, including fundraising for ASB and for the 2011 Class Gift.

In addition to her dual specializations in LIS/IPOL, she also earned a graduate certificate in Science, Technology and Public Policy at the Ford School, where she has been employed the past year.

Her professors praised Mannisto for her integrity, honesty, sincerity, and communication skills – as well as her openness to new ideas and willingness to reach out beyond SI boundaries. She is a natural and strong leader who will make outstanding contributions to her chosen field.

Mannisto was one of two SI students this year to have been awarded a prestigious Google Policy Fellowship for early-career professionals. In June, she will begin her fellowship at the American Library Association Office for Information Technology Policy, where she will focus on public policy and electronic access to content.

Murray distinguished herself both academically and in her internships at SI. Last summer she held two internships, one at the University of New Mexico, working on a DataONE National Science Foundation project, and a second conducting open-source training seminars for university librarians and graduate students in Indonesia.

During the winter semester, she worked as a reference assistant in the Hatcher Graduate Library and as a research associate at the National Poverty Center of the Ford School. According to the faculty who recommended her, she took advantage of every opportunity to pursue her interests in numeric/spatial data and did excellent work while maintaining an exceptionally high GPA.

Murray positively affected the culture of the SI LIS program with her unique combination of intellectual capability, thoughtfulness, high motivation, and great sense of focus. She has accepted a position as social science data services librarian at the University of Pennsylvania.

Photos from SI commencement

U-M News Service photos of commencements, including SI

“Along the Way”: The pre-ceremony video