Faculty Research Highlights
The University of Pittsburgh is one of the top public research universities in the United States. As part of our mission, the School of Information Sciences engages in research and scholarly activities that advance learning through the extension of the frontiers of knowledge and creative endeavor. One of the benefits of studying at the iSchool is that we encourage students and faculty to participate in academic research projects, many of which receive funding from some of the most prestigious private and public foundations. The following is a sampling of the school of Information Sciences' current projects:
Lester J. Cappon, Pioneer Public Historian
Richard J. Cox, Professor, School of Information Sciences.
Currently, Dr. Cox is preparing to write a book on the work of Lester J. Cappon (1900-1981). Cappon was a leading historian, archivist, and documentary editor who played important roles in the shaping of all three fields in the mid-twentieth century. Cappon’s main contribution to the archival community was in his writing a series of important essays on archival theory and practice.
Working with Cappon’s personal papers at the College of William and Mary, Cox selected and republished Cappon’s most important archival writings in a volume published by the Society of American Archivists in 2004. Knowing that Cappon’s personal papers would be opened in August 2006, Cox determined to do a follow-up essay about Cappon as a diarist, assuming that an investigation of his diaries would provide interesting insights into the historian and archivist as a self-documenter. Using Cappon’s diaries, along with several other important sets of archival documentation concerning the historian’s life and career, Cox is expanding his study to consider Cappon’s contributions to the understanding of the archival Impulse; the nature of diaries, the activities of the diarist, and the creation of records. The proposed publication will also consider Cappon’s often pioneering teaching about archival work, historical research, and documentary editing; his career as an early public historian; his work as a documentary editor; his ideas about and activities in scholarly publishing; and his personal collecting and how this affected his own career.
Modeling Synergies in Large Human-Machine Networked Systems
C. Michael Lewis, Professor, School of Information Sciences
In 2008, Dr. Lewis received a grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Reseach to study large-scale human computer interactions. Large networks of human and machine systems assembled in network-centric warfare have staggeringly complex properties. Many of these poorly understood and difficult to predict properties emerge from large-scale interactions and may be positive or negative. On the one hand, the indisputable strength of human decision makers lies in their ability to filter through noisy information and rapidly focus on relevant information. This ability is as yet unmatched by any automated or formal systems. However, humans trail far behind automated systems in processing vast amounts of information. This naturally leads to the promise of a synergistic human-machine system for decision-making: one which combines the raw horsepower of a machine’s ability to process data with a computational cognitive model of human decision makers including their ability to isolate relevant information. However, synergies are not inevitable if humans are inserted into complex interacting networks that focus solely on information processing prowess and ignore human weaknesses. Such impedance mismatches between producers and consumers of information can be a recipe for disaster. The overall research goal is to develop validated theories and techniques that will allow study and prediction of behavior of complex and large scale human-machine systems. This includes the development of a methodology for the study of such systems so as to ensure validity and comparability of performance results.
Adaptive Filtering Technologies
Daqing He, Assistant Professor, School of Information Sciences
The National Science Foundation awarded Dr. He a grant for $691,500 for this collaborative project with Yiming Yang from Carnegie Mellon University.
The project, entitled "III-COR: Collaborative Research: User-Centric, Adaptive and Collaborative Information Filtering," aims to significantly improve adaptive filtering technologies by understanding how to learn from multiple users with broad applications in information retrieval. The results of this project will provide a significant contribution to the field of information search and to our understanding of how to effectively learn from multiple users. The project will also discern how to combine multi-aspect user information in a new unified framework, with broad applications in information retrieval (web-based and enterprise search engines, for example) by giving them a major adaptive and personalization dimension.
Decentralized Military Information Networks
The Impact of Cultural Differences on Negotiations
C. Michael Lewis, Professor, School of Information Sciences
Dr. Lewis was awarded $1.5 million in funding for two projects from the U.S. Department of Defense’s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) program. The MURI program supports research projects of interest to the Department. Lewis, whose research interests involve human-computer interaction, is working with researchers from four other universities on a project to discover methods for observing how cultural differences may impact negotiation efforts. The results may be used to train military negotiators. For the second project, Lewis is also working with faculty at other universities to evaluate the benefits of a decentralized military information network.
The negotiation research project will help military personnel to better cooperate with people of different cultures. It is part of a larger project to understand the factors that lead to success or failure in negotiation and cooperation. Researchers from Carnegie Mellon, the University of Michigan, Georgetown and the University of Southern California are participating in the project. Lewis and the University of Pittsburgh team are developing a browser – based negotiation environment to better account for distance and language issues. The Pitt portion of this project is $600,000.
The second project is exploring the feasibility of a decentralized military information network; the team involves researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cornell, and George Mason University. The researchers are developing and evaluating a military communication system that will utilize a peer-to-peer network outside of the chain of command. While this might allow soldiers and robots to communicate and react more efficiently to changing situations, there is the possibility that the decentralization might result in confusion for the troops. Lewis and the Pitt team are evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the proposed network as it relates to how the teams of soldiers will interact with the communication system. The entire project is funded for $7.5 million; the Pitt portion is nearly $1 million.
Building Secure Mobile Ad Hoc Networks
Prashant Krishnamurthy, Associate Professor
David Tipper, Associate Professor
Prashant Krishnamurthy and David Tipper are part of a research project funded by the Army Research Office’s Multi-University Research Initiative. They are investigating how to construct robust and secure mobile ad hoc networks. "ARSENAL: A cross layer ARchitecture for SEcure resilieNt tacticAL mobile ad hoc networks” is a joint effort of 12 professors at 7 institutions: University of California, Davis; University of California, Santa Cruz; University of California, Riverside; Brigham Young University; University of Utah; University of Pittsburgh; and the Pennsylvania State University. The Army Research Office funded this innovative project for a five-year period at $6.25 million. The goal of this project is to develop a cross layer architecture that provides comprehensive security and resilience for mobile ad hoc networks. The resulting architecture will be able to adaptively provide the appropriate trade-offs between performance, security and fault-resilience.