News Archive

Phoebe Sengers and Kirsten Boehner have received an NSF grant in collaboration with Michael Mateas of UC Santa Cruz, titled “Closing the Affective Gap.” The grant, consisting of $554,768 over three years, is for the development of design and evaluation strategies that will enable individuals to gain an awareness of and ability to reflect on their emotions. Writes Sengers, “..these systems encourage emotional interpretation by reflecting the complex, ambiguous nature of affect, allowing people to actively make sense of the system’s output in the context of their everyday lives and relationships.” (November, 2006)

NSDL appears in the current issue of The Earth Scientist, the National Earth Science Teachers Association’s journal. The article showcases DLESE, both the Teaching Boxes feature as well as resources from an online seminar on hurricanes. (November, 2006)

The November edition of the National Science Teachers Association’s monthly newspaper, NSTA Reports, spotlights NSDL in a front-page article. Along with providing a background of the project’s development and detailing its goals, the article features a quote from principal investigator Dean Krafft, who asserts, “I believe we have the tools, the momentum, and the community to make NSDL a new, vibrant, and transformational digital library…” (November, 2006)

Our new major is now being highlighted that combines the study of the design of computer programs with the way in which such programs are utilized. The Information Science, Systems and Technology (ISST) major is sub-divided into two categories: ISST-MS (management science) and ISST-IS (information science) which are administered, respectively, by the School of Operations Research and Industrial Engineering (ORIE) and Computer Science (CS). (October, 2006)

Tracy Mitrano (IS and Office of VP for Info Tech) will be the featured expert on the Chronicle of Higher Education's "The Brown Bag" live discussions on Thursday, October 26 at noon, speaking on “IT Security and Legal Liability for Colleges.” (October, 2006)

Claire Cardie was cited in the October 4th edition of the New York Times, regarding government-funded software being developed to monitor public opinion of the U.S. from global news sources published in the years 2001 and 2002. Cornell University is among the participating universities, who will receive a $2.4 grant over three years for the project. Ultimately, this software will be used to identify potential Homeland Security threats. Cardie explained that the software will be sophisticated enough to differentiate between such statements as “this spaghetti is good” and, “this spaghetti is not very good – it’s excellent.” (October, 2006)

Carl Lagoze and Herbert Van de Sompel of Los Alamos have been awarded funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in the amount of $524,000 over the next two years for their proposal, titled: “Repositories Interoperability Framework Agency: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.” According to their abstract, the goal of this project is to “develop, promote, and disseminate standards that facilitate interoperability among repositories of scholarly information worldwide.” (October, 2006)

In other news for Lagoze, he and NSDL colleagues Dean Krafft, Tim Cornwell, Dean Eckstrom, Susan Jesuroga and Chris Wilper received the Best Paper award for Representing Contextualized Information in the NSDL at the 2006 10th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL) in Alicante, Spain. This success marks the group’s second Best Paper award at a major digital library conference since June. (October, 2006)

The new Information Science, Systems, and Technology (ISST) major is highlighted in the Cornell Engineering magazine. Combining the study of the design of computer programs with the way in which such programs are utilized, the ISST major is sub-divided into two categories: ISST-MS (management science) and ISST-IS (information science) which are administered, respectively, by the School of Operations Research and Industrial Engineering (ORIE) and Computer Science (CS). (Summer, 2006)

Jon Kleinberg received the 2006 Rolf Nevanlinna Prize for his "deep, creative and insightful contributions to the mathematical theory of the global information environment.” The prize has been awarded every four years since 1982 by the International Mathematics Union in recognition of the most notable advances made in mathematics for the information sciences. (August, 2006)

IS/ISST Students and Faculty -- We will be holding an informal orientation event for the new freshman Information Science students in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and their advisors on Monday, August 21st between 2:30 and 4:00 pm at 301 College Ave. (August, 2006)

Eva Tardos received the 2006 George B. Dantzig Prize. The prize, established in 1979, is awarded every three years jointly by the Mathematical Programing Society (MPS) and SIAM for original research, which by its originality, breadth and scope, is having a major impact on the field of mathematical programming. The prize was awarded at the SIAM Annual Meeting to be held July 10-14, 2006, at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts. (July, 2006)

Members of the Core Integration Team of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) Carl Lagoze, Dean Krafft, Tim Cornwell, Naomi Dushay, Dean Eckstrom, and John Saylor won the ACM Vannevar Bush Best Paper award at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2006. Their paper is entitled: Metadata Aggregation and "Automated Digital Libraries": A Retrospective on the NSDL Experience. (June, 2006)

Carla Gomes (AEM/IS) and Bart Selman (CS/IS) won an Outstanding Paper Award at the upcoming 21st National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-06). The paper is one of two award papers among nearly 800 submissions. The paper is entitled "Model Counting: A New Strategy for Obtaining Good Bounds" by Carla Gomes, Ashish Sabharwal, and Bart Selman. Ashish did his Ph.D. at University of Washington and is currently a postdoc here in Carla's Intelligent Information Systems Institute (IISI). (June, 2006)

Joseph Halpern (CS/IS), Larry Blume (Econ/IS), and David Easley (Econ/IS) have won the Best Paper Award for "Redoing the Foundations of Decision Theory" at the 2006 Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Conference. Another of Joseph Halpern's papers was among the short list of nominees,"Reasoning About Knowledge of Unawareness". This paper was co-authored with Joe's recently graduated ECE student, Leandro Rego. (June, 2006)

In connection with Michael Macy's talk last week, there is a nice write-up of the upcoming "special year" on social networks that will take place AY2006-7 at Cornell. Bill Arms, Geri Gay, John Abowd, David Easley, Larry Blume, Jeffrey Prince, Jon Kleinberg, Dan Huttenlocher and Kathleen O'Connor are involved. (May, 2006)

Eva Tardos (CS, IS) has accepted the position of Computer Science Department Chair effective July 1, 2006 for a five year term. Eva is a very distinguished scientist whose appointment will start a buzz in the international community. She is also a sensitive mentor, a superb advisor, and an inspiring example to all of us. (April, 2006)

E-print arXiv founder Paul Ginsparg (Physics, IS) is the latest recipient of the Paul Evan Peters Award, the biggest honor in the US digital library world. "Paul Ginsparg's accomplishments as a theoretical physicist, alone, distinguish him as a superb scholar, but his innovations in scientific publication, for which the Paul Evan Peters award honors him, truly place him in the annals of history as a transformative figure who has changed the landscape of scholarly communication forever," remarked Ronald Larsen, Dean of the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh and a member of the award search committee. The Award is sponsored by the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), the Association of Research Libraries, and EDUCAUSE. (February, 2006)

The eSciDoc project, a cooperative project between the Max Planck Society and FIZ Karlsruhe, has chosen Fedora as the foundation object storage layer for the project. Quoting from the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft information page:
     "eSciDoc is a 5 year project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). It is an important component of the Max Planck Society (MPG) wide sInfo program and will establish a sustainable infrastructure for scientific information, communication and distribution of research results via Open Access."
     This application of Fedora as a foundation component for eScidoc is one example of an increasing number of deployments of Fedora for new scholarly communication models in cyberinfrastructure and the Grid. Fedora was developed jointly at Cornell and U Virginia. (February, 2006 )

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded $25 million to Cornell University to support the construction of the signature building for a planned information campus that will bring together the units of Cornell's Faculty of Computing and Information Science (CIS). Read about it in the Cornell Chronicle, the Cornell Daily Sun and the Ithaca Journal. (January, 2006)

Geri Gay (COMM, IS) has been named the first endowed Bissett chair of Communication. Ken Bissett was a student in the Communication department with interests in Information Science who was killed in the Libyan bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. Read about Prof. Gay's award in the Cornell and national press. (January, 2006)

Eugene Medynskiy, an undergraduate active in the Information Science program, was selected as a finalist in this year's CRA Ugrad Research competition. Over the years Eugene has worked with Profs. Dan Huttenlocher, Jon Kleinberg, Phoebe Sengers, Michael Macy, and Geri Gay. This is a very high honor—congratulations, Eugene! (December, 2005)

Claire Cardie was recently elected to the Executive Committee of the international Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) for a 2006-2008 term. The Executive Committee consists of eight elected members, and is responsible for the administration of the Association, including the annual ACL meeting. The ACL is the international scientific and professional society for people working on problems involving natural language and computation.
     Claire was also chosen to be the Program Co-Chair of COLING/ACL 2006, a joint meeting to be held in Sidney, Australia

This semester's Cornell Engineering Magazine includes articles on Carla Gomes' (AEM, CIS) Intelligent Information Systems Institute and Kavita Bala's (CS) grant from the President's Council of Cornell Women (PCCW). (November, 2005)

The NSF has awarded $2M to Cornell to study social networks and related objects, using the huge collections of Web data that have been assembled by the Internet Archive. The principal investigator is Michael Macy and the other members of the faculty team are Bill Arms, Dan Huttenlocher, Jon Kleinberg, Geri Gay and David Strang. (October, 2005)

This week's Cornell Chronicle contained an article on the Information Science program, as did the Oct. 20 Cornell Daily Sun. Highlights include quotes from two 2005 IS graduates:
—Ross Housewright: "I was encouraged to take a broader range of courses, including psychology and socially oriented courses. I wanted to know how to apply technology to change how society works."
—Will Kruse on his decision to major in ISST: "[It] was the best decision I ever made. It really took all my interests and got them in one place." (October, 2005)

Jakob Nielsen, the leading commercial web design and usability authority, dedicated the most recent issue of his bi-weekly newsletter to the SIGIR '05 paper by Thorsten Joachims (CS), Laura Granka, Bing Pan (COMM/HCI), Helene Hembrooke (COMM/HCI), and Geri Gay (COMM/HCI). The newsletter is read by several hundred thousands of designers and usability practitioners. (September, 2005)

Professor Jon Kleinberg (CS) was selected as one of this year's MacArthur Prize winners! Jon was chosen for "...revealing the deep structure of complex networks such as genomes or computer networks, and creating new methods to extract the information embedded in them." Read more from the MacArthur Foundation and the Cornell News Service. (September, 2005)

Articles in this week's Cornell Chronicle highlighted two IS faculty members: Professor Shimon Edelman (Psychology), for his recent paper concerning natural language processing and machine learning; and Professor Dan Huttenlocher (Johnson School of Management, CS), who is Chairing the Task Force on Wisdom in the Age of Digital Information, one of three University-wide groups that are looking at major academic issues. (September, 2005)

Dean Krafft, PI, and others from the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) presented NSDL work at the House STEM Caucus in Washington D.C. on September 7. The presentation was part of the STEM Work Force Issues Solution, and was attended by about 60 congress members and staff. (September, 2005)

Johannes Gehrke (CS) gave a keynote address at the International Conference on Machine Learning in Germany last August, and will give another one this October at the SAS Data Mining Technology Conference in Las Vegas. (September, 2005)

This week's Cornell Chronicle featured an article on Professor Graeme Bailey (CS) and his multidisciplinary interests, both personal and professional. Read "Graeme Bailey reaches digital understanding via hockey, judo and the cello". (August, 2005)

In this month's Wired there is an article on the birth of Google. An interesting paragraph towards the end relates an interaction between the founders and CS Professor Jon Kleinberg. (July, 2005)

The Featured Collection for the July/August issue of D-Lib Magazine is Kinematic Models for Design Digital Library (KMODDL), contributed by Kizer Walker (Project Manager) and John M. Saylor (P.I.), Cornell University. Initial development of KMODDL was funded by a 2002-2004 National Science Digital Library (NSDL) collections grant from NSF. (July, 2005)

Professor Claire Cardie is now the Charles and Barbara Weiss Director of the Information Science Program. She can be reached at director@infosci.cornell.edu.

Carla Gomes (AEM/CIS) and Bart Selman (CS) write about constraint satisfaction in the News & Views section of the 9 June 2005 issue of Nature: "Can get satisfaction" (.pdf or .html versions available). (June 2005)

The founding class of Information Science and Information Science, Systems, and Technology majors graduated this May. A ceremony and reception were held in their honor at 301 College Avenue on Saturday, May 28th to mark this special event.

CS PhD student Daria Sorokina and CIS/Physics Professor Paul Ginsparg are highlighted in the 19 May 2005 issue of Nature Taking on the Cheats. (May, 2005)

The Social Science Advisory Council has selected "Computational Social Science: Social and Information Networks" as the second Theme Project of the Institute for the Social Sciences. The project will be led by Michael Macy (Sociology), with David Easley (Economics), Geri Gay (Communication), Dan Huttenlocher ( Johnson School and Computer Science), and Jon Kleinberg (Computer Science). (April, 2005)

Tarleton Gillespie (Communication) was featured (and IS major Ben Walther quoted) in a front page article of the Cornell Daily Sun (Apr 21) covering Tarleton's lecture "Why You're in the Trenches of the Copyright Wars."

The Fedora Project, led by Sandy Payette, was in the news recently. For a description of Fedora and its broader impact please see the article in the XML Cover Pages.

Sandy Payette will also be giving the keynote presentation at the upcoming DELOS Network of Excellence Workshop on digital repositories for e-learning and e-research, which will be held on May 11-13, 2005 in Heraklion, Crete.

Carl Lagoze will give an invited talk at the University of Pittsburgh School of Information science later this month: A Network Overlay Architecture for Contextualized Digital Libraries. (April 2005)

Claire Cardie, keynote speaker at the Workshop on Machine Learning of Information Extraction, held at the University of Antwerp, Belgium.  (March 2005)

"Cornell Scientists Tackle 'Hard' Problems by Teaching Computers to Solve Tough Tasks the Human Way" -- Cornell University Intelligent Information Systems Institute director Carla Gomes and associate computer science professor Bart Selman have developed new methods for solving hard "combinatorial" computer problems, which were detailed on Feb. 21 at the annual meeting of the American Association for ...

NSDL Whiteboard Report is published bi-weekly and contains research news, and notes from the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) of interest to the NSDL community of projects, collaborators, and funders. NSDL (NSDL.org) is the National Science Foundation's online library of resources for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education. The Whiteboard Report 2000-2005 archive (February 2005)

Technology Research News magazine's "Top Picks: Technology Research Advances of 2004" (December 29, 2004/January 5, 2005 issue) includes the appearance by Information Science Cornellians present and past:
Jon Aizen, Dan Huttenlocher, Jon Kleinberg, and Tony Novak, in the Internet category: "Researchers from Cornell University and the Internet Archive devised a way to measure users' reactions to an item description: a "batting average" of the number of users who go on to download the item divided by the number of users who read the description."

Natural language processing research on sentiment analysis by graduate student
Bo Pang and Associate Professor Lillian Lee draws attention in the news. (November, 2004)

On Monday, November 1st, the Information Science Program hosted a Fall Ugrad Open House and Information Session at the IS building (301 College Ave.). IS faculty and a number of our new IS/ISST undergraduate majors attended --- to answer questions about the new IS programs and the spring INFO course line-up; to see demos in the HCI lab (courtesy of Professor Geri Gay and her students); and, of course, to socialize with the help of mulled apple cider and brownies! (November, 2004)

Carla Gomes and Bart Selman received the Distinguished Paper Award at the 10th International Conference on the Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP-2004) for the paper entitled "Statistical Regimes Across Constrainedness Regions. (November, 2004)

Carla Gomes was quoted on complexity theory in the Chicago Tribune as a speaker at the inaugural event for the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO), Northwestern University. (November, 2004)

In President Jeffrey Lehman's State of the University Address he gives high profile to a new CIS (Computing & Information Science) building in the next 5 - 6 years and features the major in Information Science in three undergraduate colleges and the minor in seven undergraduate colleges and a new Ph.D. in Information Science. (October, 2004)

The National Science Foundation has funded Pathways Projects to add user-tailored access to the National Science Digital Library (NSDL). Introducing NSDL Pathways: Internet Scout Project, WGBH Teachers' Domain, The Mathematical Association of America, Shodor Education Foundation, and Eisenhower National Clearinghouse. (October, 2004)

Bart Selman talked about artificial intelligence in two articles, "Types of AI: Living up to the nightmare" and "The evolution of artificial intelligence", in the September 2004 issue of Graduating Engineer and Computer Careers magazine.

NSF Awards $1.8 Million to CS, Astronomy, the Program in Computer Graphics, and the Cornell Theory Center. The overall "Petabyte Storage devices for Data-Driven Science" project will be be directed by Al Demers. Al is joined by Prof Jim Cordes from Astronomy and  Profs Kavita Bala, Steve Marschner, Dan Huttenlocher, Jon Kleinberg, Bill Arms, Johannes Gehrke and Jai Shanmugasundaram from CS. (September, 2004)

NSF awards $1.3 million for investigation of a new scholarly communication infrastructure ("Pathways: Lifecycles for Information Integration in Distributed Scholarly Communication").    Investigators include Carl Lagoze, Sandy Payette, and Simeon Warner, along with Herbert Van de Sompel  from LANL and John Erickson  from HP Labs.  The project is funded through the NSF Science and Engineering Information Integration and Informatics program.  (September, 2004)

IMLS awards grant for Digital Library of Printable Machines: Models for Collection Building and Educational Outreach. (September, 2004)

Johannes Gehrke appointed Associate Professor of Theory Center. He will provide leadership to CTC's data-intensive computing initiative. (August 26, 2004)

FALL 2004 INFO COURSES (August 20, 2004)

Paul Ginsparg's information Op-Ed in New York Times, "The Truth Is Still Out There" (August 3, 2004)

The July 28/August 4th issue of Technology Research News contains article on: Jon Aizen, Dan Huttenlocher, Jon Kleinberg, and Tony Novak's work on tracking the popularity of downloadable items on the Web, and the use of this at the Internet Archive. The work appeared in the January 6, 2004 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy Of Sciences (July 30, 2004)

IS Seminar special talk by Paul Dourish, School of Information and Computer Science, University of California Irvine. Title of talk: The Social and the Technical in Ubiquitous Computing (July 1, 2004)

Cornell University's Human-Computer Interaction Group has made a specialty of designing digital guides with place-specific content as referenced in the NY Times - Circuits article entitled: For Wandering Tourists, Help From on High (June 10, 2004)

The NYS Education department has now approved a new Information Science Doctor of Philosophy program (Ph.D.) at Cornell University. More information will be available as soon as possible through this website. (June 3, 2004)

Johannes Gehrke receives Provost Award for Distinguished Series. (April 4, 2004)

Carl Lagoze wins the American Library Association's Frederick G. Kilgour Award for research in library and information technology. (March 24, 2004)

Geri Gay honored with Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellowship teaching award. (March 18, 2004)

E-mail doesn't lie (that much), says Jeff Hancock, Cornell assistant professor of communication. (February 18, 2004)

Thanks to CU project, L-VIS is in the library. (February 05, 2004)

Internet-First publishing project at Cornell University offers the old and the new. (January 29, 2004)

Undergraduate major in Information Science approved in Arts & Sciences, CALS, and Engineering. (January 1, 2004)

Among the Ivy, a Campus Tour Guide That Beeps. (August 10, 2003)

Cornell professor Paul Ginsparg, science communication rebel, named a MacArthur Foundation fellow. (September 26, 2002)

4-21-08 Sarah