A collaboration between the College of Communication and Information PhD student and  School of Information Sciences professor has resulted in innovative research that reaches into the future of AI-powered voice digital assistants and explores how it can be more diverse, equitable, and inclusive.

While she was in the MSIS program, Lara Marler (’17) started a passion project to get books into the hands of refugee children in Knoxville, and that project recently came to full fruition in the form of 68 backpacks filled with tools to ready Swahili-speaking children for kindergarten. Each backpack has a picture book in Swahili and related activities and supplies, with a curriculum Marler wrote herself.

When Joseph Winberry was still a master’s student at SIS, he was a graduate teaching assistant to Associate Professor Devendra Potnis and also assisted in research. Both Potnis and Winberry are interested in social innovation, social justice, and the role information sciences can play in both of those areas.

Jesse Morris has been simultaneously working in a data management position at Oak Ridge National Lab while taking classes in the MSIS program for the last four years. One of the benefits of this has been aligning class projects with work she’s doing at her job. That’s the case for the paper she wrote that won the 2021 SIS Best Paper Award, “GIS for Knowledge Management: Leveraging mapping tools to address baby boomer ‘brain drain”.”

This paper, and some of her other projects, were inspired by a reoccurring issue within her department, which tests water samples throughout the area.

Kay P Maye never really noticed how information flowed and shaped the world prior to entering the MSIS program, but now he sees it everywhere, in everything he does. He’s particularly interested in how everyday people find information and how they judge whether or not it is good or bad information.

In all the years that Julie Longmire has been working in college advising, one thing has remained the same: she loves seeing the look a student gets when they are excited about their classes and imagining what their future will look like after graduating.

Four months into her position as assistant dean for undergraduate programs and advising for the College of Communication and Information, Longmire is excited to once again be interacting with undergraduate students and helping them plan the next steps of their educational journey.

Jonathan Habashey was one of the first students to join the undergraduate information sciences program when it started in fall 2019, and now he will be one of the first to graduate from it.

Habashey likes talking to people and understanding how they think, but he also likes technology. He started out interested in computer science, but wasn’t very interested in the coding aspect of it – that’s when he found out about the new information sciences major.

Charlie Mix and Nyssa Hunt look at the “Cradle of Southern Appalachia” map. – Photo by Angela Foster, University of Tennessee, Chattanooga

Information is delivered in many forms, and for MSIS student Charlie Mix, maps are his deliverable of choice. Mix earned a bachelor’s degree in geography and went on to work for the National Park Service and for land trust and watershed conservancies before landing at Interdisciplinary Geospatial Technology Lab at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, five years ago.

When Rachel Gammons (MSIS ’12) had to teach her first synchronous class online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, she pulled herself back to a few years ago when she was in the MSIS program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, so she could extract the parts of her experience that made her feel connected to faculty and other students in virtual classrooms.

“I want it to feel like a real, holistic and complete learning experience for them. You definitely have more perspective as an online teacher if you have been an online student,” Gammons said.

Coming Full Circle