Faculty
Research Update
David Eichmann
David Eichmann's research involves the interplay between
information retrieval and language understanding, with a healthy salting
of software engineering and databases. He works on information extraction
and question answering from text and detection of novel information
from document streams. He and D.J. Park (a Computer Science doctoral
student) have expanded their work in shot boundary detection and story
segmentation in digital video to now include feature extraction. D.J.'s
"Bill Clinton" detector outperformed all others in this year's TRECVID
evaluation.
Jim Elmborg
During the past year, Jim Elmborg continued his work with information
literacy and academic librarianship. He presented one paper in Havana,
Cuba entitled "Literacies Large and Small: The Case of Information
Literacy," and he presented a paper at the Library Research Seminar
entitled, "Information Literacy and 'Real' Literacy: Theory into Practice."
He also finished work on a book of case studies collected from college
libraries examining their collaborations with writing centers. That
book, entitled "Centers for Learning: Libraries and Writing Centers
in Collaboration," will appear this spring. Elmborg also received
a major project grant from the Arts and Humanities Initiative to create
a digital library of the media archive of the International Writing
Program at The University of Iowa.
Marc Light -
Marc Light continues to work on extracting information automatically
from bioscience literature. He gave presentations on this work at
the SLA Annual Meeting in Nashville, the Department of Biostatistics
and Medical Informatics of the University of Wisconsin, a workshop
at the Human Language Technologies conference in Boston, and at the
NSF Protist workshop in Iowa City. This year he has started a collaboration
with Dr. Shannon Bradshaw of Management Sciences who is a Knowledge
Management expert. The focus of the collaboration is the integration
of text mining and knowledge management technologies in service of
the bioscience research community.
Christine Pawley
Christine Pawley continues her research in the history of readers
and reading. During her spring semester leave, she worked on the first
draft of her book, Networks of Print: Reading and Community in
Twentieth Century America. She also worked on projects relating
to LIS education. An article on information literacy appeared in Library
Quarterly, and a new article on race and the LIS curriculum was
accepted for publication by LQ, and will appear in January
2006. She presented papers at a Newberry Library Seminar (May), at
the conferences of the Women and Gender Historians of the Midwest
(Chicago, June), the Library Research Seminar (Kansas City, October),
the American Studies Association (Atlanta, November), and gave invited
presentations at the Midwest Archives Conference (Des Moines, October)
and a symposium to honor the career of Jane B. Robbins at Florida
State University (Tallahassee, November).
Rebecca Platzner resigned her position as Assistant
Professor after completing her second year at SLIS. She plans to return
to other pursuits.
Padmini Srinivasan
Padmini Srinivasan has worked on extending Manjal, her text mining
system, as part of her 3 year NSF funded research. The system has
already been used successfully to discern beneficial links between
turmeric and problems such as retinal diseases. She presented this
research at the ISMB (Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology),
conference in Scotland. She also presented papers at SIGIR, MEDINFO
and BIOLINK. Recent journal papers have appeared in JASIST
and ACM Transactions on Internet Technology. Padmini has
given invited talks at Indiana University, Purdue University, George
Mason University, and at several symposia, and continues to enjoy
her collaborations with students and colleagues.
Faculty web pages and contact informaiton can be accessed via the
SLIS Faculty
Directory.
