Maryland’s iSchool Faculty and Students Present at iSchools Conference (College Park, MD 3/10/08)
Maryland’s iSchool is pleased to announce that six faculty members and one doctoral student successfully presented at the 2008 iConference in Los Angeles.

Kari Kraus, presented her paper “Prim Drift, Copy Bots, and Folk Preservation: Three Copyright Parables about Art in the Digital Age” during the paper session. The paper employs a series of case studies from the domains of digital arts and reactive/experimental new media to elicit tensions and contradictions in the current state of copyright and intellectual property law.

In the roundtable discussion session, Scott Paquette and Dave Yates alongwithpanelists consisting of faculty from Syracuse, University of Washington and University of Southern California presented “Information Assurance, Intelligence and Security: Opportunities and Directions for Future Research”. The panelist presented a picture of the current state of research in the information assurance and security field including current trends, directions and new areas of emphasis for future research, how the iSchools have the potential to develop unique contributions to the field, and possible collaborations between iSchool researchers and other departments.

Dr. Trudi Bellardo Hahn, presented her poster “Federal Funding for Information Research.” The poster addresses the patterns of funding for information science research.  The study examines several major funding agencies and their missions and funding priorities, and concludes with recommendations for increasing the chances of success in winning federal grants. She also participated in the faculty mentoring session for untenured faculty, as one of the senior mentors.

Dr. Jimmy Lin, organized a panel session on "cloud computing", an emerging technology for tackling Web-scale challenges using large computer clusters.  Fellow panelists included Dennis Quan, CTO of IBM's High Performance On Demand Solutions (HiPODS) Division, and John Unsworth, Dean and Professor, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  The panelists offered their views on the future of computing and implications for iSchools as a whole.

Dr. Derek Hansen, led a Wildcard session on undergraduate education in iSchools, which included panelists from the iSchools at Syracuse, Washington, and Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Participants discussed the contributions that iSchools make to the core undergraduate education experience, the challenges of introducing a new undergraduate program, the market for iSchool undergraduate students, best practices that have led to successes, as well as mistakes that should be avoided.

Dr. Douglas Oard attended the Deans meeting and served as the chair and moderator for one of the paper sessions.

Doctoral student Pengyi Zhang presented her poster “Support Sense-making with Tools for Structuring a Conceptual Space.” The poster describes a proposal to study sense-making processes and tools, including the theoretical framework, design of a sense-making tool and plan for its formative evaluation. The goal of the sense-making tool is to assist users with structuring their conceptual space and creating a task report from the conceptual structure.