Welcome to UMSI WIRE, a quarterly compendium of news and research from the University of Michigan School of Information for educators and information professionals.

UMSI researchers bring home the awards at CSCW conference

UMSI faculty and PhD students are presenting more than three dozen papers, posters and workshops at the 2019 2019 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) November 9-13 in San Diego.

Papers authored by UMSI researchers have earned two Best Paper and five Honorable Mention designations. Read more.

CSCW “recommends” early Paul Resnick research

Paul Resnick will receive the “CSCW Lasting Impact Award” for groundbreaking research he co-authored. The award honors “GroupLens: an open architecture for collaborative filtering of netnews,” an early paper on recommender systems, published at the 1994 CSCW conference. Read more.

Hemphill, Thomer and Yakel earn $1 million in grant funding for groundbreaking research on data curation

A team of researchers from UMSI and the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) has received grants totaling nearly $1 million from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the National Science Foundation to study the impact of data curation on reuse.

This project is one of the first large scale empirical studies of the impact of data curation ever conducted. Read more.

Teasley, Newman named ACM Distinguished Members

Research professor Stephanie Teasley and associate professor Mark W. Newman have been elected Distinguished Members of the Association for Computing Machinery, both noted for their scientific contributions to the computing field. Read more.

Chen delivers keynote address at Economic Science Association Conference; receives Bell Award

Professor Yan Chen was a keynote speaker at the 2019 ESA North American meetings in Los Angeles in October. ESA is an international association for experimental economists.

Her address, “Putting Organization into the Gig Economy: Field Experiments at a Ride‐Sharing Platform,” discussed experiments UMSI researchers conducted using the Chinese ride-sharing platform DiDi. Read more.

Also in October, Chen received the Carolyn Shaw Bell award of the American Economics Association, which recognizes an individual who has furthered the status of women in the economics professions. Read more.

Gates Foundation aids efforts to improve immunization in Pakistan

Clinical assistant professor Mustafa Naseem has secured two $100,000 Grand Challenges Explorations grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. One will fund a machine learning-based algorithm to identify errors in electronic immunization data in Pakistan. A second grant will create an android application that synthesizes vaccination data into actionable snippets for vaccinator supervisors. Read more.

Professor Ron Eglash presents at the National Tribal Energy Summit

UMSI professor Ron Eglash spoke on the complex algorithms at the heart of traditional Native American practices, such as weaving, architecture and ecosystems engineering in a talk at the National Tribal Energy Summit in Washington, D.C. in September. 

Tiffany Veinot’s excellent August

On August 8, Dean Thomas Finholt announced that associate professor Tiffany Veinot had accepted the newly created position of Associate Dean for Faculty at the School of Information. The Regents formally approved the appointment in October. Read more.

Veinot was a guest editor of the August/September issue of JAMIA, The Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. This special double issue of JAMIA focuses on health equity, an area of passion and focus for Veinot. 

DARPA Award for more responsive AI that combines human and machine

Assistant Professor of Information, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Walter Lasecki has been awarded a DARPA Young Faculty Award for his project, “Hybrid Intelligence Agents for Deploying Robust AI Systems.” The award recognizes “rising research stars” who hold junior faculty positions, with the goal of developing the next generation of scientists who will address national security challenges. His project seeks to combine human and robotic intelligence to make AI systems more responsive and robust. 

Paul Courant named Distinguished University Professor

UMSI professor Paul Courant is one of six new Distinguished University Professors approved by the U-M Board of Regents at their July 2019 meeting. Since 1947, these professorships have recognized senior faculty with exceptional scholarly or creative achievements, national and international reputations for academic excellence and superior records of teaching, mentoring and service. Read more.