iSchool Students Awarded at University Graduate Research Day(College Park, MD, 5/13/09)

Maryland’s iSchool students participated in the Graduate Research Interaction Day (GRID) in April of this year. GRID is a campus-wide, conference style event where research done by graduate students at the University is presented and discussed by faculty and students from many departments and schools. GRID is conducted with an inter-disciplinary focus where the judges consist of faculty, postdoctoral fellows, administrators, library subject specialists, and advanced graduate students. GRID 2009 had 168 participants across 17 different themes.

Master of Library Science student, Jeanne Kramer- Smyth, who won 2nd place in the category "Smart computers and computer science" for her poster presentation "ArchivesZ: Visualizing Archival Collections."  ArchivesZ is a prototype for an information visualization tool designed to support search, understanding and exploration of archival and manuscript collections. It seeks to address one of the major challenges facing those who work with archival records: the need to understand the scope and quantity of available records. Since archival collections are unique, vary dramatically in record quantity and are organized based on the records’ creators, it can be a challenge for users to gain perspective concerning the available records across multiple collections.

Two Master of Information Management students, Manasee Mahajan and Vrushank Salaskar, won 1st place in the Urban Issues category. They had a poster entry which presented their team project for INFM 718V - Organizational and Business Process Modeling. Their project aims to model the problem of traffic congestion in the city of Pune, India. The project considers the effect of various socio-economic factors on the traffic and identifies causal relationships between these factors. The considered factors include increasing population, enhanced lifestyle, lowering prices of automobiles, increasing road area, state of public transportation etc. Finally, the project recommends policy measures to the local administration for reducing, if not eliminating traffic congestion problem in the city.