Date | Presenter | Title and Abstract |
Sep 2 | Geri Gay | Mobility and Computing |
Sep 9 | Carl Lagoze - Senior Research Associate, Computing and Information Science | Creating a
contextualized learning environment: Current work in the National
Science Digital Library Project
The NSDL (National Science Digital
Library) Project, in which Cornell CIS is a key participant, has
been funded by the US National Science Foundation to create a
networked information environment that advances the state of
science, mathematics, and engineering education. There is a body of
research indicating that teachers and students require more than the
well-known search-and-access information paradigm (in the manner of
Google or conventional digital libraries). This research suggests
that contextualization of information - indicating by whom and how
it has been used - is essential for its educational relevance. We
are therefore investigating, designing, and implementing information
architecture based on the notion of a network overlay, whereby
information resources can be inter-related, augmented, and enhanced. |
Sep 16 | Naomi Dushay |
Visualization of Bibliographic Metadata to Promote Resource
Discovery User interfaces for
digital information discovery often require users to click around
and read a lot of text in order to find the text they want to read,
a frustrating and tedious process. This is exacerbated further due
to limitations on the amount of readable text that can be displayed
on a computer screen. Believing information visualization techniques
can improve the user experience of computer mediated information
discovery, I will present a number of explorations and relate them
to the traditional library context, to NSDL objectives and to
broader metadata analysis and resource discovery objectives. |
Sep 23 | Bill Arms | Social
Science Research using the Web Lab An Information Science seminar last semester described the building of the Web Lab, using data from the Internet Archive's 40-billion page collection of Web pages. The lab is being built in the Cornell Theory Center as part of the NSF-funded Petabyte Data Store. The NSF has now awarded Cornell another large grant under its social science's Next Generations Cybertools program. This is a joint project between Sociology and CIS. The aim is build an intelligent front-end that will make the Internet Archive data broadly accessible to social scientists, and to develop, test, and refine these tools through a specific research application: the diffusion of innovation and beliefs. The importance of this work extends beyond pure research to practical applications for business and government, e.g., to identify market trends, the rise and fall of demand, and the spread of consumer opinion. This brown bag discussion will emphasize the challenges in building bridges between social science research, and the methods of high performance computing and large-scale data mining. There are questions of human computing interaction, legal concerns, and experimental design. But above all there are the cultural differences: the social sciences and computer science look on the world through very different eyes. |
Sep 30 -- no brown bag meeting | ||
Oct 7 | ||
Oct 14 | Cancelled | |
Oct 21 | Tom Bruce, Director, Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School | The Legal
Information Institute is a leading free-to-air provider of legal
information, Cornell's most heavily-trafficked Web site, and
generator of an inexhaustable supply of research and engineering
problems. The LII's goal is to increase public access to legal
information and to increase public understanding of law,
particularly in places that are not well served by current
commercial services (that is, practically anywhere outside large law
firms). We service that set of aspirations with research and
engineering aimed at creating sophisticated, low-cost information
publishing and discovery technologies. I'll present a long wish-list of research questions and engineering projects, but focus closely on four that are of immediate interest to us, and hopefully to some of you: linkage and network structures in the United States Code, large body of (XML-encoded) legislation; machine-learning approaches to the extraction of legal citations; named-entity recognition as a means of relieving privacy concerns pertaining to legal records, court proceedings, and so on; and a grab-bag of projects related to improving the interaction of non-experts with expert information. There will be ample time for questions. |
Oct 28 | Tracy Mitrano | Three Big Issues in Information Technologies: Digital Copyright: The Grokster Decision; Government Surveillance: Communications Assistance Law Enforcement Act; and Information Security |
Nov 4 | ||
Nov 11 | Carol Minton Morris, communications director of the NSDL and an Information Science research associate | New NSDL
User Services: "On Ramp," an NSDL Content and Communications System
and "Expert Voices," an NSDL Blogging Project Abstract: Since 2000 the National Science Foundation has awarded over 190 grants in the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) program. NSDL is a free and open public resource that serves as a nexus for educators, researchers, policy makers and the public by building bridges: --Between private sector and public interests by providing access to resources such as publishers' journal articles, teacher-created lesson plans and real-time data sets from scientists --Between the scientific, research and educational communities by applying advanced technologies to stimulate new ways for educators and learners to access and use scientific information --Between teachers and learners at all levels, in all locations by supplying content and tools in open-access, non-proprietary formats in an easily accessible online environment. NSDL Core Integration is exposing the bi-directional flow between and among these stakeholders in an NSDL Information Network Overlay (INO) to provide organized access to user-contributed contextual information about resources and tools in the Library. This bi-directional flow, the representation of primary resources from the underlying raw data layer and contextual information from the upper layer, allows the INO to evolve over time into an increasingly rich information space. In the same way that amazon.com is an information source that extends far beyond a product catalog, we expect that digital libraries built on the INO model will reflect expanding communities of knowledge built over the resources in the library. [1] Two services that will enable the exchange of all types of contextual documents from publications to workshop materials, combined with an intellectual commons for the nimble contribution, distribution, and dissemination of user-contributed dialog about resources are in development. "On Ramp," a content and communications management system, and "Expert Voices," a blogging project, will provide avenues for contribution and content-sharing that leverage the rich FEDORA architecture underlying the NSDL Data Repository (NDR). Surveys, use case interviews, and prototype walk-throughs have informed design and early implementation phases for both services. Results and alpha versions of On Ramp and Expert Voices will be presented and discussed. [1] Lagoze, C., What is a Digital Library Anymore? Dlib Magazine, Nov. 2005 |
Nov 18 | Phoebe Sengers | Affective
Presence (Joint work with
Kirsten Boehner, Geri Gay and Jofish Kaye) |
Organizer: Gilly Leshed