SIS Represents at ASIS&T, Best Paper Awarded to Faculty & Alumni

October 25, 2019 by Hillary Tune

Faculty, alumni, and students from the School of Information Sciences participated at the 2019 Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) Annual Meeting in Melbourne, Australia this past week, and several received honors for their work.
Most notably, SIS Associate Professor Wade Bishop, SIS Assistant Professor Carolyn Hank, and SIS alumni Joel Webster (‘18) and Rebecca Howard (‘19) received the ASIS&T Best Paper Award for their paper, “Scientists’ data discovery and reuse behavior: (Meta)data fitness for use and the FAIR Data Principles.”
Bishop said he and Hank knew they were doing important work when they received best paper on this study and its method at the 2018 International Digital Curation Conference in Barcelona. The topic of their most recent paper is how to use human behavior to teach machines (AI) to think like users when determining fitness for use of data.
“This would’ve been success enough to know our contribution will help improve data findability and use for humans and machines in the real-world, but it was an honor to be recognized at ASIS&T by our home domain of information science(s),” Bishop said.
The co-authors have been able to disseminate portions of the project to a variety of communities over the past 18 months, including the Research Data Alliance 2018, American Geophysical Union 2018, IDCC 2019, the US Geological Survey Community for Data Integration 2019, and other venues.
“Qualitative research takes a long time to do correctly, with transcribing, coding, and re-coding…The project was well received and commended by scholars and researchers across the data fields,” Bishop said.
Other SIS members participated at the event, some earning honors for their research or service. They are:

• SIS Assistant Professor Brian Dobreski, whose dissertation, “Values in Knowledge Organization Standards: A Value Analysis of Resource Description and Access (RDA),” received an honorable mention for the ProQuest Best Dissertation Award during the ASIS&T awards banquet.
• SIS Professor Dania Bilal received a certificate of completion upon conclusion of her service as director at-large.
• Doctoral student Iman Tahamtan received the ASIS&T New Leaders Award for the 2019-2020 year.
• SIS Associate Professor Awa Zhu chaired a workshop, “Practical Social Informatics: Collaboration Across Fields, Sectors, and Borders (SI),” in which PhD student Cassandra Huang also participated.
• Zhu also presented a paper, “Do I Own It? U.S. and Chinese College Students’ Digital Ownership Perceptions,” which she co-authored with Tao Yang, a visiting scholar whom she is currently sponsoring.
• Huang presented a poster, “Cyberbullying in the Digital Age: Exploring People’s Opinions with Text Mining,” which she co-authored with Tahamtan.
• Doctoral student Michelle Parker presented a paper, “The Role of Data and Synthesis Centers in Convergence Research,” which she co-authored with SIS and Chancellor’s Professor Suzie Allard, and SIS alum Danielle Pollock.