 |
| Information Science + Information Studies (ISIS) News Summary Administration | Curriculum | Events/Forum | Technology Nicholas Gessler and Katherine Hayles, both currently from UCLA, are slated to join the Duke Community in Fall 2008. Nick will have appointments in the Franklin Humanities Institute and ISIS and Katherine in Literature and ISIS. Courses and cross-listed courses offered included:
Soft cross-listed courses were:
Zach Maurides completed a project called TeamWorks: Athlete Scheduling Spring 2007 graduates included:
Victoria Szabo purchased an island in Second Life. It’s called the Duke ISIS Oasis and The TechTuesday forum continued in the Spring with typical attendance being 20-25. We hosted the following speakers: January 16, 2007: Deborah McGuinness "Emerging Semantic Web Trends: Transparent and Trustworthy Applications and Semantically-Enabled Scientific Data Integration." As web applications proliferate, more users (both people and agents) find themselves faced with decisions about when and why to trust application advice. In order to trust information obtained from arbitrary applications, users need to understand how the information was obtained and what it depended upon. Particularly in web applications that may use question answering systems that may be heuristic or incomplete or data that is either of unknown origin or may be out of date, it becomes more important to have information about how answers were obtained. Emerging web systems will return answers augmented with Meta information about how answers were obtained. In this talk, Deborah McGuinness will describe an approach that can improve trust in answers generated from web applications by making the answer process more transparent. The added information is aimed to provide users (humans or agents) with answers to questions of trust, reliability, recency, and applicability. The talk will include descriptions of a few representative applications using this approach explaining cognitive assistants that learn and intelligence analyst tools. The talk will also briefly highlight work on semantically-enabling access to and integration of scientific data. Examples will be taken from Deborah’s work on the NSF-funded Virtual Solar Terrestrial Observatory and the NASA-funded Semantically-Enabled Scientific Data Integration projects. January 23, 2007: Paul Jones Paul Jones will be preparing his talk on his wiki. Anyone may add things to it. Also, feel to leave comments to the post or on his blog as to what he could say during his TechTuesday talk. February 6, 2007: Jane Gaines and Josh Gibson Afterward, we held a tour of the ISIS Deep Lagoon Mac Lab in John Hope Franklin Center room 036. February 20, 2007: Harry Halpin Title: The Next Generation of the Web The Web is, in the words of its inventor Tim Berners-Lee, a "quite boring place" where a human user goes from one hypertext document to another by following a link. With the rise of the "Web 2.0" phenomena, the combination of Javascript and XML (AJAX) can now be used to deliver applications over the Web itself - and now after the original "dot com" crash, both the creativity and money have returned. However, there are concerns about data privacy and the scalability of this approach. One possible road of evolution is the Semantic Web, which applies the principles behind the Web (a universal naming system for information and the ability to link arbitrary information) to any sort of information, not just hypertext. With the rise of microformats and a new technology called GRDDL, we can now deploy the next-generation of the Semantic Web easily from the current Web to achieve globally scalable "mash-ups." Finally we will investigate the use of functional programming and proofs to answer the age-old question: Where did your data come from, and who did what to it! March 6, 2007: Richard Lucic and Sarah Ellis During her first semester of music theory, junior Sarah Ellis saw her fellow students struggle with the development of aural skills, primarily because they did not know how to practice on their own. An open-ended final project for ISIS 140 thus provided her with the perfect opportunity to develop iTheory, a music theory ear-training program for the iPod. Through a series of quizzes, iTheory allows on-the-go users to practice interval recognition, scale recognition, chord recognition and perfect pitch. March 20, 2007: John Taormina April 2, 2007: Nicholas Tishuk (A special TechMonday presentation) Teenagers love technology. Whether in the form of on-line video games, Sidekicks, MySpace profiles, or Youtube videos, high school students today are deeply, and often emotionally, invested in interactive forms of communication. Yet despite the influx of internet-ready computers into schools, current teaching practices utilize just a tiny fragment of interactive media. The Google search has replaced library stacks, for better or worse, as the main source of student research, yet few classrooms harness the interactive potential of online technologies. This talk focuses on the ongoing engagement of Wiki technology in a New York City high school serving predominately working class youth of color. It will touch on the themes of student-centered learning, decentralized pedagogy, rapidly changing information cycles and the promotion of social equity through technology education. Nicholas Tishuk has taught English in Brooklyn and Queens high schools for the last five years. He is the Coordinator of Teaching and Learning at The Renaissance Charter School in Jackson Heights, Queens. For the last semester, his students have been engaged in creating an online community made possible through easily accessible, free Wiki technology. You can check out their constantly evolving work here. April 17, 2007: Jessica Mitchell ISIS also hosted two more Game Nights during the Spring semester. They were held on January 24 and March 28. Only a few students showed up to the January event. Those that did brought their own Nintendo Wii which was hooked up to the projection screen. The March Game Night was much more widely attended and a Wii was brought to this one too. Also, Working @ Duke attended and interviewed and shot photos for an article in their May issue. The Podcast Academy V was held on February 14-15 in the Franklin Center room 028 and 240. Co-sponsors were ISIS, GigaVox Media Inc., the John Hope Franklin Center, CIT, OIT and Theater Studies. We charged for this podcast conference. It was free to the Duke community and $149 for others. Including staff and all sponsors, we had 95 people registered. 58 were from Duke and 37 were from elsewhere. Video and audio files can be found on the PAV website without the schedule. ISIS co-sponsored the Security and Liberty Forum held at UNC on April 14. Speaker and Panel Discussion topics
The Private Sector & Consumer privacy Data mining & propensity profiling
View the event website here. ISIS also co-sponsored the HASTAC InFormation Year conference, specifically Lev Manovich’s talk “Software Takes Command, or life after After Effects” on April 18 at the Nasher Museum. Finally, ISIS held a commencement ceremony for the Spring 2007 certificated graduates Alexander Apple, Marcin Dobosz, Zachary Maurides and Peter North. It was held on Saturday, May 12 and the students presented their capstone projects to an audience of their families and ISIS affiliates. ISIS obtained lab space in room 036 in the Franklin Center. It is called the ISIS Deep Lagoon (IDL) Mac Lab. It features a desktop MacPro with video-editing equipment, a podcasting station and the M3C cart—newly refurbished with software updates, batteries and memory. ISIS was also gifted 5 Mac desktop computers from CSEM. They are being updated and added to the lab. We are hoping to be able to use one tower as an ISIS server. The IMPS space was outfitted with a security cabinet jointly by ISIS and the Franklin Center. It is located in the alcove of FC room 130.
|
