Fall Updates from the Department of Information Science

As the College of Computing & Informatics (CCI) wraps up 2020, the Department of Information Science is pleased to share recent news and updates from fall term:

New Faculty & Professional Staff

The Department of Information welcomed three new faculty members: Milad Toutounchian, Assistant Teaching Professor; Christopher MacLellan, Assistant Professor; and Bo Song, Assistant Teaching Professor. The Department also welcomed two post-doctoral researchers: Rachel Amey and Shruti Sannon. 

Conference Activity & Publications

• Assistant professor Jina Huh-Yoo presented a paper published with Emilee Rader from Michigan State University: “It's the Wild, Wild West: Lessons Learned From IRB Members' Risk Perceptions Toward Digital Research Data” at the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing in October 2020.
  
  
• Assistant professor Jina Huh-Yoo won an honorable mention award for her paper, coauthored with JY. Shin: “Designing Everyday Conversational Agents for Managing Health and Wellness: A Study of Alexa Skills Review,” published in EAI Pervasive Health in October 2020. 

• Associate professor Aleksandra Sarcevic published a paper with coauthors Emily C.Alberto, Michael J. Amberson, Megan Cheng, Ivan Marsic, Arunachalam Thenappan, Karen J.O'Connell, and Randall S.Burd: “Assessment of Nonroutine Events During Intubation After Pediatric Trauma” in the Journal of Surgical Research, November 2020 issue.

• Associate professor Aleksandra Sarcevic and CCI doctoral student Swathi Jagannath published a paper with collaborators Emily C Alberto, Maureen E McCusker, Susan Keller, Ivan Marsic, Karen J O'Connell, and Randall S Bur, “Classification strategies for non‐routine events occurring in high‐risk patient care settings: A scoping review” in the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice in August 2020. 

• Alice B. Kroeger Professor Jane Greenberg, CCI doctoral student Xintong Zhao and collaborators presented, “Assembling Ontologies for the Discovery of New Materials” at the virtual Networked Knowledge Organization Systems Consolidated Workshop (NKOS 2020) on Sept. 9.

• CCI doctoral student Xintong Zhao along with Drexel professors Jane Greenberg and Xiaohua Tony Hu, as well as colleagues Vanessa Meschke and Eric Toberer at Colorado School of Mines, presented a short paper, “Scholarly Big Data: Computational Approaches to Semantic Labeling in Materials Science” at the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries Workshop: Organizing Big Data, Information, and Knowledge on Aug. 5 (virtual via Wuhan, Hubei, P. R. China).

• Assistant Professor Mat Kelly and co-authors presented a workshop titled “TMVis: Visualizing Webpage Changes Over Time,” at the ACM/IEEE JCDL 2020 Workshop on Web Archiving and Digital Libraries (WADL 2020) in August 2020. The extended version, published as a preprint/technical report, is available at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.02487.pdf [PDF]. 

• Doctoral students Xintong Zhao, Deborah Garwood, and Jeremy Leipzig presented their research at the MTSR 2020–14th International Conference on Metadata and Semantics Researchduring the Digital Libraries, Information Retrieval, Big, Linked, Social and Open Data track on Dec. 3. 

• Associate Professor and Women in Tech Initiative Director Michelle Rogers and co-authors published their paper “Cultivating a STEAM interest in Black Girls in an After-School Program” in the proceedings of the virtual SITE Interactive Conference on Oct 26, 2020 (Available at: https://www.learntechlib.org/p/218169/).

• CCI doctoral students Michael Monselise, Ou Stella Liang, Sonia Pascua, with CCI faculty members Jane Greenberg, Mat Kelly and Christopher Yang, published a paper, “An Automatic Approach to Extending the Consumer Health Vocabulary,” in the Journal of Data and Information Science in Sept. 2020 (https://doi.org/10.2478/jdis-2021-0003).

• Assistant Professor Jina Huh-Yoo published a paper: “A User-Centered Design Approach to Developing a Voice Monitoring System for Disorder Prevention” in the Journal of Voice Nov. 2020 issue (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0892199720304069).

• Assistant Professor Christopher McClellan published a paper: “Domain-General Tutor Authoring with Apprentice Learner Models” in the International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education in Oct. 2020 (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40593-020-00214-2).

• CCI doctoral student Chris Rauch presented a paper, “A Computational Approach to Historical Ontologies,” at the 2020 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE BigData 2020) on Dec. 11. The paper was co-authored by Assistant Professor Mat Kelly, Professor Jane Greenberg, doctoral student Sam Grabus, Joan Boone (California Digital Library) and Peter Melville Logan (Temple University).

• Associate Professor Erjia Yan and doctoral student Jiangen He published a paper “Analyzing academic mobility of US professors based on ORCID data and the Carnegie Classification” in Quantitative Science Studies in Sept. 2020 (https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/qss_a_00088).

• CCI doctoral student Meen Chul Kim, CCI alumna Yuanyuan Feng, and Yongjun Zhu of Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea published a paper: "Mapping scientific profile and knowledge diffusion of Library Hi Tech" in Library Hi Tech October 2020 issue.

• CCI doctoral student Meen Chul Kim and collaborators Fei Wang of Cornell University, Seojin Nam and Yongjun Zhu of Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea published a paper “Mapping scientific landscapes in UMLS research: a scientometric review” in the Journal of American Medical Informatics October 2020 issue. 

• ALISE Conference: Assistant Professor Alex Poole and Professor and LIS Program Director Denise Agosto presented during a panel "Integrating Community-Based Learning with LIS Education," on Oct. 19. Professor Denise Agosto and colleague June Abbas (University of Oklahoma) presented their paper "LIS Youth Services Education: The Importance of Family and Community Context," on Oct. 22.

• ASIS&T Conference: Professor Denise Agosto participated in an ASIS&T panel "Allyship and Mentorship of Diverse Information Science Faculty," on Oct. 28. CCI doctoral student Gabrielle Salib, and CCI faculty members Tim Gorichanaz and Denise Agosto presented their paper, “'Dear Amy': Seeking Support on YouTube," Oct. 29. Professor and IS Department Head Xia Lin presented in an ASIS&T workshop “Best Practices for Grant Proposal Development,” on Oct. 30. Assistant Teaching Professor Tim Gorichanaz presented three papers: “Toward an integrated information science,” “ASIS&T heritage and information history,” and “Conceptualising and studying information creation: from production and processes to makers and making.”

Awards & Grants

• Associate Professor Andrea Forte (co-PI) won a four-year, 1.2 million dollar collaborative National Science Foundation grant with New York University ($388k to Drexel) for her project “SaTC: CORE: Medium: Threat Intelligence for Targets of Coordinated Harassment.”
• Professor Il-Yeol Song and co-author Veda C. Storey won the DKE Best Paper 2017 Awardfor his paper titled “Big data technologies and Management: What conceptual modeling can do.” Prof. Song was recognized during a virtual, formal award ceremony on Nov 3, 2020. Read more
• CCI’s Metadata Research Center, led by Jane Greenberg, in partnership with Montana State University Library, UC San Diego Library, and OCLC, was awarded $887,154 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) for the LIS Education and Data Science-Integrated Network Group (LEADING). The LEADING project will officially launched on Nov. 1, building off the highly successful LEADS initiative and extending the data science educational pipeline to a broader range of participants.
• Assistant Professor Alex Poole (PI) was awarded a grant (2020-2021) from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) for his project, “Exploring New Frontiers in 21st Century Archival Education.” The project is in partnership with the Catholic University of America’s Department of Library and Information Science (Jane Zhang), and in consultation with the Archival Education and Research Initiative (AERI), the Academy of Certified Archivists (ACA), and the Society of American Archivists’ Committee on Education (CoE), its Graduate Archival Education Subcommittee (GAES), and its Archival Educators Section (AES).
• On Dec.4, doctoral candidate Jeremy Leipzig and Jane Greenberg were awarded the “Best Research Paper Award” at the 14th International Conference on Metadata and Semantics Research (MTSR 2020). The paper, titled “Biodiversity Image Quality Metadata Augments Convolutional Neural Network Classification of Fish Species,” was co-authored by J. Leipzig, Y. Bakis, X. Wang, M. Elhamod, K. Diamond, M. Maga, W. Dahdul, A. Karpatne, P. Mabee, H. L. Bart Jr. and J. Greenberg.

Recent Events

• This fall, CCI held its fourth and fifth sessions in the "Hiring Outlook for Information Professionals Webinar Series." Hosted by Denise Agosto, these sessions featured experts discussing topics and employment trends in areas such as digital libraries, music librarianship, software development, and information management systems. View the full series on our YouTube channel. The webinar series kicks off again on Jan. 26, 2021 with a special focus on UX industry trends.
• On Dec. 3, the Metadata Research Center hosted the 2020 Alice B. Kroeger Distinguished Lecture with James Briggs Murray, Founding Curator (1972-2009) of the Moving Image and Recorded Sound Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, Research Libraries. His presentation was titled “Understanding and Developing Black Popular Music Collections.”
• Assistant Professor Alex Poole presented his research for his IMLS-funded project during a Dec. 16 webinar hosted by the Association for Southeastern Research Libraries “Special Collections and Archives: Exploring Recently Funded IMLS Projects.”