Events

NJ-ASIS&T 2007 Distinguished Lectureship

Professor Tefko Saracevic, Ph.D.

Friday, October 12 at 4:30 PM
Heldrich Hotel, 10 Livingston Avenue (downtown New Brunswick)

Information Science: Where Does it Come From and Where is it Going?

The New Jersey Chapter of the American Society for Information Science & Technology (NJ/ASIS&T) is pleased to honor Tefko Saracevic, Ph.D. with its 21st annual Distinguished Lectureship Award.

Dr. Saracevic, Professor II at Rutgers University’s School of Communication, Information and Library Studies, is scheduled to speak in conjunction with the School’s 25th anniversary celebration on Friday, October 12 at 4:30 PM. His lecture, entitled “Information Science: Where Does it Come From and Where is it Going?" will be held at the Heldrich Hotel, 10 Livingston Avenue in downtown New Brunswick.

Beginning with an overview and brief history of information science, including its problems and solutions within a social context, Dr. Saracevic will discuss research, development and testing in the area of information retrieval, and commercial information retrieval in the form of search engines. Dr. Saracevic will discuss the relationships between information science, librarianship, and the growth of digital libraries. Following Dr. Saracevic’s lecture will be a reception at the hotel.

In addition to teaching at Rutgers University’s School of Communication, Information and Library Studies, Dr. Saracevic is the author of numerous articles on topics such as testing and evaluation of information retrieval systems; the notion of relevance in information science; and digital libraries. He has also presented papers at international meetings in 43 countries and is a co-chair of the annual conference and course Libraries in the Digital Age (LIDA) held in Dubrovnik, Croatia. Dr. Saracevic is a former president of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, which bestowed him with its prestigious Award of Merit. He has also received the Gerard Salton Award for Excellence in Research from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval. Currently, he is the editor-in-chief of the international journal Information Processing & Management.

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Past Events

NJ-ASIS&T 2006 Distinguished Lectureship

Elisabeth Davenport
Professor of Information Management, Social Informatics Research Group
Napier University, Edinburgh, Scotland 

Thursday, November 2, 2006
Rutgers -- The State University of New Jersey

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User Experience Research Challenges in Interactive Webcasting

April 5th at 7 PM
CoRE Lecture Hall (1st Floor), Busch Campus, Piscataway, NJ

Ron Baecker
Knowledge Media Design Institute, University of Toronto

Media spaces are environments that incorporate computer and communication technologies, typically including the Internet, to allow distributed groups of individuals to interact in real-time. My talk will begin by reviewing past media space work on desktop videoconferencing, electronic classrooms, and meeting capture, especially projects at Xerox, Toronto, Sun, Berkeley, Microsoft, and Georgia Tech. We focus particularly on webcasting as an interesting media space that has excellent potential for scalability across a large number of sites. The downside is that webcasting is typically a one-way broadcast from a transmitter to a multitude of receivers, and an ephemeral event that exists only during the live broadcast.

The Toronto ePresence Interactive Media system creates a media space that allows distributed groups of individuals to participate and interact in webcast events such as lectures, and to do so before, during, and after the event. The system currently supports video, audio, slide, and screen broadcasting; concurrent slide review; integrated moderated chat and VoIP support for questions and discussion; tailorable skins; the automated creation of structured, navigable, searchable event archives, and automated data collection for evaluation. Speakers are not forced to use PowerPoint — ePresence transmits several rich media presentation formats. The system is highly cross-platform, supports viewing at bandwidths as low as 56K, and is being distributed via open source and community source strategies. I shall introduce the system and describe some eLearning and medical education projects to which it has been applied.

Perhaps the most important achievement is the creation of a flexible, modular, extensible infrastructure for exploring frontiers of collaboration technologies, for example the following research challenges:

• combining webcasting to many viewers with audio conferencing via VoIP to a few participants
• enhancing in-room awareness of remote participants via text chat displays and webcam slow scan video
• achieving voice recognition of lectures, and solving human factors issues in using imperfect transcripts
• enabling persistent conversation over webcasts (both live and archived) for learning communities
• enhancing collaboration support for distributed teams, e.g., integrating ePresence with blogging and wikis
• allowing user control of live webcasts, including pausing them briefly and then having them “catch up”
• evaluating ePresence in real eLearning uses, such as a test for tri-campus education planned for the fall.

The talk will report on early results in tackling the first four challenges and directions for the other three.

Please see the information form for a further description of the talk.

 

Breitzman and 1790 Analytics Overview

March 31, 2006
Noon to 3pm (lunch included)
IEEE
445 Hoes Lane, Piscataway, NJ

Dr. Anthony Breitzman, Principal and Director of Research,
1790 Analytics, Mt. Laurel, New Jersey
http://www.1790analytics.com

Dr Breitzman will introduce and validate a method for identifying
technologically similar organizations, industries, or regions by applying
the techniques from information science for term similarity to international
patent classifications. Several applications of the method will be explored,
including identifying hidden competitive threats, finding potential acquisition
targets, locating university expertise within a technology, identifying
competitor strategy shifts, and more.

Cost: ASIS&T Members $20; Students, retirees $15; non-members $25.

Click here for more information and registration

 

OpenURL and LinkServer Basics

Eric Hellman, Director of OCLC Openly Informatics
http://www.openly.com/company

Wednesday, March 8, 2006
1:30 to 3 pm
IEEE
445 Hoes Lane (Room Ada C), Piscataway, NJ
Presented in conjunction with the NJ Special Libraries Association

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30th Anniversary Celebration

The information science landscape has changed greatly over the past 30
years -- join New Jersey ASIS&T as we reflect upon the rich history of the
science through the remembrances of our past chairs.

Monday, February 13, 2006
at the Rutgers Club
199 College Ave, New Brunswick NJ
5:30-9:00 PM

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NJ-ASIS&T 2005 Distinguished Lectureship
Susan Dumais
Senior Researcher
Microsoft Research -- Adaptive Systems and Interaction Group
Thursday, September 22, 2005
Rutgers -- The State University of New Jersey

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Blogs: Passing Fad or the Revolutionary Communication Tool?
Friday May 20, 2005
Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation
One Health Plaza
East Hanover, NJ 07936
Noon-3:30 PM

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NJ-ASIS&T Spring Program
Are you feeling lucky? Google Scholar and the traditional avenues of information retrieval
Friday, March 4, 2005
IEEE Operations Center
445 Hoes Lane
Piscataway NJ 07070
Noon-3:30 PM

Click here for more information.