Faculty Members

(College Park, MD – 10/8/07)  The College of Information Studies is proud to announce that faculty members Ping Wang, Douglas W. Oard, and Kenneth R. Fleischmann have received a three-year $700,000 grant from the National Science Foundation’s Human and Social Dynamics program.  The program seeks to foster breakthroughs in understanding the dynamics of human action and development by creating new knowledge about organizational, cultural, and societal adaptation and change. 

This new research project on “Scalable Computational Analysis of the Diffusion of Technological Concepts” aims to leverage emerging techniques from computational linguistics to populate models that describe the generation and dissemination of specific technological innovations.  By applying automatic tagging and classification to high-volume information flows from multiple sources, the project seeks to create a new middle ground between narrowly focused (but richly analyzed) case studies and existing scalable techniques (e.g. citation analysis) that leverage fewer types of evidence.  

The project will begin with a focus on information technology as an exemplar field, leveraging the broad and accessible discourse on specific information technologies from both formal and informal sources.   Findings from those initial studies will then serve as a basis for applying similar techniques to other fields.  This project is one of several in which faculty and students in the College of Information Studies are applying “computational thinking” to create new opportunities that address important research challenges in the social sciences and humanities.