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iSchool at Michigan does i-Conference at UCLA
(Mar 2008) Having hosted the previous i-conference in late 2006, U-M's School of Information was all over this one. Literally.
More than a dozen presentations at the 2008 i-Conference, held at UCLA at the end of February, featured work by SI faculty or students (not to mention our alumni).
At a paper session chaired by Professor C. Olivia Frost, SI doctoral student Rick Wash gave a paper titled "Understanding del.icio.us Tag Choice Using Simulations." It presented work he had done with SI colleague Emilee Rader on how users of the social bookmarking Web site del.icio.us decide which tags, or keywords, to attach to the links they post.
Wash and Rader used simulation software to test different hypotheses on tag choice strategy, then compared their predictions to actual tagging data for the same set of bookmarked Web sites.
The hypothesis that best fit the actual data was one Wash and Rader themselves had proposed in an earlier paper -- essentially, that users tend to favor tags they have used before.
Associate Professor Mark Ackerman was a panelist in a session on the challenges of publishing multidisciplinary research. Panelists addressed questions of whether there are unique barriers to publishing multidisciplinary research, if so how these barriers can be overcome, and whether there is a need for distinct methods and publications for ischools research.
Associate Professor Paul Conway presented a paper on "Ethics, Information Technology, and Today's Undergraduate Classroom." Ethics and Information Technology is the title of a new SI course being offered in 2008 as part of the core of the new undergraduate concentration in informatics at U-M. Conway has led SI's contribution to this multi-unit program and was co-developer of the new course. His experience in developing the course figured prominently in the work he presented.
Assistant Professor Lada Adamic's presentation at the "Social Network Analysis" roundtable included a review of some of the projects SI students had created for her fall 2007 network analysis class (SI 508/708). Adamic presented these projects as representative of the range of ischool-related topics that could be examined using network analysis tools and approaches. You can see some of these student projects online.
SI doctoral students Sean Munson and Libby Hemphill led a roundtable session titled "Training, Integration, and Identity: A Roundtable Discussion of Undergraduate and Professional Master's Programs in iSchools." The session discussed the role research should play in the training of students in the ischools' professional master's programs. Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Judy Olson was one of the featured panelists at this roundtable session. Background materials on the session and follow-up notes are posted to the session wiki.
Assistant Professor Steve Jackson took part in a session that discussed Sandra Braman's book Change of State as a seminal work in the information policy field. Panelists argued that a central tenet of the work, that "trends in information policy both manifest and trigger change in the nature of governance itself," is a critical one for ischool students to understand.
Jackson also took part in a session titled "Bridging Discourses: Exploring the Relationship between Information Technologies and International Development." There he presented early findings from the African Knowledge Infrastructures project, which lays out guidelines for improving "IT for development" practices in Africa.
Postdoctoral fellow David Ribes led a session on the challenges of bringing together domain scientists, social scientists, and information scientists to establish science collaboratories such as the NEESGrid project.
Participants who compared stories included SI Associate Dean for Research and Innovation Tom Finholt. Finholt found that bringing together what can be quite disparate academic worlds in such projects might be best understood using the anthropological metaphor of "first contact" between alien civilizations, and that carefully managing first contacts between such groups can contribute mightily to ensuring a successful collaboration.
As chair of the previous i-conference, Finholt also served on the planning committee for the 2008 conference.
Assistant Professor Soo Young Rieh took part in a session titled "Information Credibility: Let's Get Serious (and Have Some Fun Too!)." She presented on work she had done with SI doctoral student Brian Hilligoss developing a framework for assessing the credibility of information sources that is applicable across a wide range of media, settings, and subject domains.
SI scholars contributed to the conference poster session as well.
Doctoral student Lian Jian presented a poster on work she had done with advisor Jeff MacKie-Mason looking at the factors that bring some Wikipedia contributors to end their collaboration with the online encyclopedia and at how to create incentives to motivate continued content development.
Doctoral student Jinfang Niu presented a poster on the impact of documentation practices on secondary use of data sets. As more social science data sets become available, Niu argues, it becomes ever more important for information scientists to be involved in developing the documentation and metadata that will make those data sets useful as resources for future research projects. Niu outlines a study that will examine how researchers choose data sets and how insights into that decision process can be used to improve documentation standards.
Doctoral student Rick Wash presented a poster that examined means for designing better incentives into systems that will help home computer users keep their systems secure. Wash is applying social psychology theory and economic modeling to design technology that will not only make it easier for home users to secure their networks from hackers, but also make it more likely that home users will actually take the needed steps to use the security technology properly.
Finally, SI alumni were also major contributors, in some cases presenting work they had completed with SI faculty.
Kate Williams (Ph.D. '05), now on faculty at Dominican University, presented a paper on community informatics coauthored with SI Professor Joan Durrance.
Andrea Wiggins (MSI '07), now in the doctoral program at Syracuse's ischool, presented on the master's thesis work she had done at SI with professors Lada Adamic and Mick McQuaid. (One of the visualizations that resulted from this work was presented at a juried art show at U-M last year.)
Other recent SI graduates who presented at the conference included Derek Hansen (Ph.D. '07), now an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, and Cliff Lampe (Ph.D. '06), now an assistant professor at Michigan State University.
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