IS News 
Faculty Positions Open
The School of Information Sciences (http://www.ischool.pitt.edu) at the University of Pittsburgh is seeking candidates for a several faculty positions to start in the fall term of 2010. Learn more.
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Supports iSchool Initiative to Increase Diversity in Graduate Studies
The School of Information Sciences is pleased to announce that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has given the iSchool a grant of $100,000 to support the planning of initiatives to increase diversity in graduate programs at Information Schools. The Mellon grant will be used to design and develop a series of summer institutes, an annual program to be administered by the iSchool to recruit graduate students and faculty members from underrepresented groups to the field of information sciences. The institutes will focus on promising juniors and seniors in college who demonstrate strong potential to eventually earn doctoral degrees and become faculty members in the Information Sciences. Learn more.
SIS Alumni Society wins Gold Banner Award
SIS Alumni Society wins Gold Banner Award for their achievements in the Pitt Alumni Association Banner Program from FY ’09. This award includes a $500 contribution to the School’s Scholarship Fund. The Pitt Alumni Association Banner Program honors those constituent groups who demonstrate participation in each of the Pitt Alumni Association’s strategic direction; financial strength, communications, student involvement, and partnerships. The Gold Banner award honors groups who perform above and beyond the requirements of the traditional banner program. SAS exceeded Pitt Alumni Association annual membership recruitment goals by 25%, raised over $2,500 for their endowed scholarships, hosted numerous career networking events, including Professional Development Days and panel discussions, and recruited 20 new members to the Pitt Career Network.
Borgman, MLS'74, 2009 University Legacy Laureate
Christine Borgman (MLS ’74) was honored as a 2009 University of Pittsburgh Legacy Laureate. The Legacy Laureate program was developed in 2000 to recognize alumni for their personal and career achievements, while at the same time providing them with an opportunity to contribute to the success of today’s University of Pittsburgh students. This is the highest honor bestowed upon a Pitt alumni. Dr. Borgman was honored during this year’s Homecoming festivities on October 22, 2009.
Bowker Secures NSF Funding for “Team Science” Project
Geoffrey C. Bowker, Professor and Senior Scholar in Cyberscholarship, is the recipient of a National Science Foundation (NSF) award to study the emergence, coalescence, and structural form of multidisciplinary distributed teams in science. Dr. Bowker will serve as Principal Investigator for the two-year project, “Team Science: Sociotechnical Dimensions of Distributed Work,” which the NSF recently funded for $249,411. Learn more.
Susan “Leigh” Star joins iSchool faculty
The School of Information Sciences is pleased to announce that Susan “Leigh” Star and Geoffrey C. Bowker are joining the faculty of the iSchool. Star will hold the Doreen E. Boyce Chair in Library and Information Science, named in honor of Dr. Boyce, who served many years as President of the Buhl Foundation. Star was selected for the Boyce Chair in light of her interest and scholarship in the broad roles of the library and of information in modern society. Learn more about Susan “Leigh” Star.
Geoffrey C. Bowker joins iSchool faculty
Bowker will serve as Professor and Senior Scholar in Cyberscholarship. With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Bowker will develop the resources and framework for understanding how scholars in different disciplines develop their informatics as the underlying discipline adapts to the emerging digital technologies that make up cyberinfrastructure. Learn more about Geoffrey C. Bowker.
iSchool welcomes new faculty — Jung Sun Oh and James D. Currier
Students will see several new faces among the faculty here at the iSchool. In addition to Susan “Leigh” Star and Geoffrey Bowker, we welcome Jung Sun Oh and James D. “Kip” Currier to the School’s faculty. Oh and Currier will teach in the Library & Information Science Program. Learn more.
IMLS Grant awarded to iSchool and Health Sciences Library System
The Institute of Museum & Library Services (IMLS) announced a grant for $991,311 to support the creation and implementation of a new degree program, “Post Master's Degree Certificate of Advanced Studies in Health Sciences Librarianship.” The program will be managed jointly by the iSchool and the Health Sciences Library System (HSLS). Students who have already earned their MLIS degree will undertake specialized preparation for professional positions in health sciences libraries through online coursework, an applied research project, mentoring experiences, and attendance at a national conference. The generous grant from IMLS will support the costs of curriculum development and evaluation, online course delivery infrastructure, and student recruitment. In addition, the grant will cover tuition costs for 27 students as they progress through this unique yearlong post-Master’s program. Students will be enrolled in the program beginning in May 2010. Learn more.
Karimi edits new Geoinformatics reference book
Hassan Karimi, Associate Professor at the iSchool, is the editor of the newly-released “Handbook of Research on Geoinformatics,” published by Information Science Reference of Hershey and New York. This reference work is the first to discuss a complete range of contemporary research on geoinformatics issues, trends, theories, technologies and applications. Learn more.
iSchool signs MOU with Athabasca University
A Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was recently signed between the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Information Sciences and Athabasca University in Alberta, Canada. Athabasca is known as “Canada’s Open University,” and is dedicated to the removal of barriers that restrict access to and success in university-level study and to increasing equality of educational opportunity for adult learners worldwide. The School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh (the iSchool) has been educating information professionals for more than 100 years and has introduced a very successful online Master’s degree program that has graduated more than 400 students. The iSchool also offers a number of courses in the online environment which are not part of a distance degree program in order to make our academic expertise more widely available. Learn more.
Brusilovsky Named "Senior Member" of the Association for Computing Machinery
Peter Brusilovsky, Associate Professor, has been honored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) as a “Senior Member.” The Senior Member Grade recognizes those ACM members with at least 10 years of professional experience and 5 years of continuous Professional Membership who have demonstrated performance that sets them apart from their peers. For 2008, there were 162 scholars from universities, research institutions, and corporations who were similarly honored. ACM is the largest educational and scientific computing society for the world's computing educators, researchers and professionals. It is the Association’s mission to inspire dialogue, share resources and address the field's challenges.
Brusilovsky is known for his research in the areas of Adaptive Web-based Systems, Adaptive Hypermedia, Adaptive Interfaces, Intelligent Tutoring Systems and Shells, Student and User Modelling, Human-Computer Interaction, and Artificial Intelligence. In 2005, he won the prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award for his work on “Personalized Access to Open Corpus Educational Resources through Adaptive Navigation Support and Adaptive Visualization.” He also serves as Associate Editor of the recently-introduced IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies.
Dean Larsen to serve on NSF Committee of Visitors
Ronald L. Larsen, Dean of the iSchool, has accepted an invitation to join the Committee of Visitors (COV) for the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Division of Information and Intelligent Systems. The COV is tasked with conducting reviews of the various NSF programs to maintain high standards of program management, provide advice for continuous improvement of NSF performance, and to ensure openness to the research and education community served by the NSF.
The COV provides the NSF with evaluations and advice in two areas: assessments of the quality and integrity of program operations and program-level technical and managerial matters pertaining to proposal decisions; and comments on how the work product generated by awardees have contributed to the attainment of NSF's mission and strategic outcome goals.
The IIS program at the NSF supports education and research in the integrated roles of people, technology and information. The core programmatic areas in IIS include human-centered computing; information, integration, and informatics; and robust intelligence.
Dean Larsen has served as a grant proposal reviewer for the NSF in the recent past, as well as a program advisor and reviewer for both the Digital Libraries in the Classroom program and the International Digital Libraries program. He also convened a special NSF workshop on scholarly information repositories, which resulted in the publication of “The Future of Scholarly Communication – Building the Infrastructure for Cyberscholarship.” Larsen has served as Dean of the iSchool since 2002. Prior appointments include serving as Assistant Director of the Information Technology Office (ITO) at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
NSF offers grant to Tipper
David Tipper, Associate Professor and Chair of the Telecommunications & Networking Program, has been awarded a grant by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop and test methods for evaluating information assurance mechanisms for Information and Communications Technology (ICT). The two-year grant will support a collaborative effort between researchers at three different institutions: Duke University, University of Missouri-Kansas City, and the University of Pittsburgh. There is a critical need for systematic Information Assurance (IA) methods that enable ICT systems to adapt and survive any type of disruption or attack. A major hurdle in the development of such IA techniques is the lack of models and metrics which support evaluating the effectiveness of IA mechanisms. This project is focused on the development of metrics and models that will allow one to quantitatively study the technical aspects of IA for the network component of the ICT infrastructure. The basis of the approach is to build a common scalable framework with a well-defined set of metrics and application scenarios. The impact of the models and metrics developed is that they will provide the techniques and tools necessary to determine the effectiveness of IA mechanisms. In addition, they will allow for the detection of bottlenecks and the evaluation of tradeoffs between levels of information assurance, performance and cost. Learn more.
Brusilovsky receives NSF award
Peter Brusilovsky, Associate Professor at the iSchool, recently was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation for his work on ENSEMBLE, which will create a computing pathway to the existing set of NSF STEM Digital Libraries (NSDL). This system will ensure that the NSDL pathways provide a more complete coverage of STEM areas. The computing pathway supports the full range of computing education communities, provides a base for the development of programs blending computing with other STEM areas, and produces digital library innovations that are propagated to other NSDL pathways. Since computing communities continue to rapidly evolve, the computing pathway greatly aids computing educators in those areas. Dr. Brusilovsky will serve as Principal Investigator for this three-year project. ENSEMBLE is a collaborative project with researchers from Villanova University, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Drexel University, Portland State University, and Texas A&M University.
iSchool helps to create Telecommunications Program at Kosovo University
The School of Information Sciences (SIS) won a U.S. government-sponsored competition to help launch a telecommunications graduate program at University of Pristina and provide the recovering nation with the ideas and experts needed to rebuild its infrastructure following years of war and unrest. The three-year, $450,000 partnership was announced Aug.13 by the Washington-based organization Higher Education for Development (HED), which will oversee the $450,000 award Pitt received from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and coordinate communication between the universities and USAID. The iSchool will collaborate with Pitt's Center for Russian and East European Studies (REES). More.
iSchool Opens New Networking Lab
The iSchool has redesigned the Telecommunications Networking Lab (Room 831) to support hands-on lab experiences for students as well as the research activities of faculty. This laboratory will primarily be used for a new networking laboratory course (TELCOM 2010) that will be required for graduate Tele students and offered as an optional senior elective for undergraduate students. The objective of this lab-based course is to gain experience with computer networking issues through hands-on experiments with network equipment and services. Students will be able to experience networking from basic connections between two PCs to routing to advanced network applications. The course will cover topics such as connectivity at the physical layer, Ethernet and WLAN performance and management, IP address planning and management, IP router configurations, network monitoring and management, signaling protocols for VoIP services, and web-based services configuration.
The lab facility provides for four independent workbenches accommodating four students each. Each workbench has 3 PCs, one laptop and a networking equipment rack. This will allow each of the students at a workbench to work together on the assigned problem or design –allowing students to experience the team approach to problem-solving that exists in industry. An extra equipment rack in the lab provides interconnectivity between the four workbenches thus allowing the configuration of complex topologies involving ALL devices present in the lab. A separate research equipment rack was installed to support network configurations and to offer more network capabilities for faculty research programs.
The laboratory facility was designed by Visiting Professor Walter Cerroni and Carlos Caicedo, a PhD candidate in the Telecommunications and Networking program. The curriculum was designed by the faculty in the Telecommunications and Networking program.
Pitt receives Research Designation
The National Security Agency (NSA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have announced that the University of Pittsburgh is designated as a “National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Research” for the years 2008 – 2013. This designation was bestowed at a ceremony on June 4, 2008 at the annual conference of the Colloquium for Information Systems Security Education at the University of Texas at Dallas. Pitt is one of 23 such National Centers; this honor recognizes the quality of the School of Information Sciences’ Information Assurance and Security curriculum and research program. Ronald L. Larsen (Dean) and James Joshi (lead faculty for the Security Assured Information Systems Track of Study) were present at the designation ceremony. Learn more here.
SIS receives Mellon Grant
The School of Information Sciences has received a five-year, $782,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the development of a graduate research program designed to understand and influence the emergence of digital communication and research in academia, known as cyberscholarship. The grant also provides resources to hire a professor who will work within SIS and Pitt’s University Library System to explore how disciplines are re-examining scholarly priorities, reshaping methodologies, and redefining evidence bases as a result of new media and new tools, according to SIS dean and professor Ronald L. Larsen, who will lead the program. Learn more about this grant.