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iSchool PhD Students Recognized at International Conferences

07/26/2011

The faculty, staff and students extend their congratulations to Denis Parra and Brian Cumer, PhD students at the iSchool. Each participated in a major conference in their field and was recognized for excellence in their research.

Denis Parra, a PhD student in the Information Sciences Program, won the James Chen Best Student Paper Award at UMAP 2011 in Spain, for his work on “Walk the Talk” with Xavier Amatriain of Telefonica Research. UMAP is the principal conference for researchers and practitioners working on adaptive systems -- systems that adapt to their individual users, or to groups of users, while collecting information about users for this purpose. Parra’s winning paper examined how to effectively gather and evaluate user preferences or tastes (implicitly or explicitly); then, the authors proposed a linear model to tie the variables which impact feedback about the user to the ratings of a product or service.

Brian Cumer, a PhD student in the Library & Information Science Program, won the Third Place Award in the Poster Competition at the 2011 Archival Education and Research Institute (AERI), held at Simmons College in Boston. Funded by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, AERI brings together incoming and continuing doctoral students, recent doctoral graduates, and faculty in archival studies and education from across the United States and worldwide.  Cumer’s poster examined “Records in Archaeological Research: A Historical Case Study Examining the Mandates of Change in Archaeological Recordkeeping in the United States.” This work explores how changes in technology and policy during the 20th and 21st centuries influenced the nature of archaeological recordkeeping in the United States.