Events
Monday, November 15, 2010
BOV Poster Session and Reception
12:00 noon – 2:00 pm
Eighth Floor Labs
More than 20 posters and demonstrations will help you to discover the depth and breadth of doctoral research here at the iSchool. Please browse through the session and meet our doctoral students. Feel free to ask questions and discuss the intriguing research being presented here.
New Faculty & Staff Sessions
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Room 522
Research and teaching interests of new faculty members
Konstantinos Pelechrinis, Assistant Professor
There has been a rapid and extensive proliferation of wireless networks in the last decade. The anytime, anywhere connectivity has made them attractive in every sense. However, the shared nature of the wireless medium gives rise to important performance issues. For example, serious threats to information assurance are posed, while limitations on the rate at which information can be exchanged over these networks exist. Dr. Pelechrinis will briefly present his previous research dealing with security threats that target different parts of the network architecture. He will also discuss his experiment-based efforts on next generation wireless networks. The lessons learned are applied to the design of protocols that utilize wireless resources more efficiently.
Going forward, it is important not only to assure the delivery of information but also its quality. In particular, we are interested into knowing the trust level for the actual data received. This question is extremely challenging to answer, especially in light of the number of different ways that knowledge is being disseminated. Social and telecommunication networks are just two examples of totally different, yet prevalent ways of accessing information. Dr. Pelechrinis will outline his research vision and perspective on approaching and addressing this task, which is so central to an information science school. In addition, he will briefly present his proposal, for a new graduate course, in collaboration with Dr. Knobel, which will frame the aforementioned heterogeneous structures in network theory.
Cory Knobel, Assistant Professor
Dr. Knobel's current research engages the emerging Values in Design (VID) agenda, which considers social values as explicit drivers and inputs to the process of information technology and systems design. While the VID perspective has applications in many social domains and levels of scale, his current interests are focused on values in scientific cyberinfrastructure and cyberscholarship. Some of the relevant questions being explored are:
- What social values of scientific communities are encoded in large-scale data sharing systems? How do these values affect the sharing and reuse of scientific datasets?
- How can advanced computational and information representation technologies engage scientists' sense of "play" to produce new kinds of science?
- Can we extract new types of process metadata by providing different modalities of interaction with scientific datasets?
- In what ways can emerging multimodal technologies and environments facilitate the confluence of art, technology, and science?
- What are emerging best practices in contextually understanding large sociotechnical systems that unfold over long periods of time? How do we design for evaluating the success of infrastructure with a "long now" perspective?
Mohd Anwar, Visiting Researcher
Dr. Anwar’s research focuses on the issues of privacy, security, and trust raised by computer mediated communication. He will give a brief overview of his work on design, implementation, and study of tools and techniques to facilitate privacy and trust in online learning environments, as well as those that enhance privacy and security in online social networks. He will also present his current research agenda of developing usable protection mechanisms for online social networks and employing social network platforms for navigational, educational, and information retrieval purposes.
Mike Depew, Project Director, The iSchool Inclusion Institute
The iSchool Inclusion Initiative (i3) was created with the purpose of diversifying the population of graduate students and faculty at US-based Schools of Information Science (iSchools). Supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation with a three-year grant, the i3 Program will address the critical shortfall of individuals from underrepresented groups in the Information Science disciplines and professions. Students will thus have role models to whom they can personally relate, and who will provide concrete evidence that the information professions are not only open to all, but that diversity in the workforce is essential.
Update on Institutional Advancement / Capital Campaign
Building a service-oriented culture of excellence, Sandra E. Brandon, Chief of Staff
Sandra holds the newly-created position of Director of Administration/Chief of Staff for the School of Information Sciences. She is responsible for leading the administrative staff, operations, technology, and external relations efforts for the school. She also serves as a strategic advisor to the Dean, manages special projects for the School, and provides direction and oversight for all budgetary and fiscal functions.
Prior to joining the iSchool, Ms. Brandon served as Crayola’s Vice President and Chief Information Officer, as well as a member of the Executive Operating Committee from 2002-2010.