In January 2012, Dr. Michael Atwood (Associate Dean for Research and Professor) was awarded the SIGCHI Lifetime Service award, which is given to individuals who have significantly contributed to the growth of SIGCHI (Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction) in a variety of capacities. SIGCHI, as part of the Association for Computing Machinery, is the premier international society for professionals, academics and students who are interested in human-technology and HCI. In addition to his sustained service to SIGCHI, Dr. Atwood was specially recognized for his extended contributions to and influence on the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community at large.
On January 18, Dr. Denise Agosto (Associate Professor) presented an invited paper entitled "Promoting Active Learning in LIS Education” at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Association of Library & Information Science Educators, in Dallas, TX.
Dr. Chaomei Chen (Associate Professor) presented a paper at the SPIE Visualization and Data Analysis (VDA) conference entitled "SDSS log viewer: visual exploratory analysis of large-volume of SQL log data." The work was supported by NSF Grant IIS-0612129. Authors included Jian Zhang, who graduated from the iSchool's doctoral program last year and now works at IBM Shangai, Michael S. Vogeley, Department of Physics, Drexel University, Danny Pan, a doctoral student at the Department of Physics, Drexel University, and collaborators from Johns Hopkins University, Ani Thakar and Jordan Raddic. Dr. Chen was also chair of the VDA conference.
Research Grants and Research Announcements
1) Tony Hu (PI) Yuan An, Il-Yeol Song (co-PIs); "IUCRC for the Visual and Decision Informatics”, ($275,000 over 5 years).
February 2012 - Drexel University & The University of Louisiana at Lafayette EstablishNational Science Foundation Industry/University Cooperative Research Center
Drexel University and The University of Louisiana at Lafayette have been awarded funding by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to create the Center on Visual and Decision Informatics (CVDI).
In partnering with industry members, the CVDI will serve as a research hub in developing visual and decision support tools and techniques to enable decision makers in government and industry to fundamentally improve the way their organizations’ information is interpreted and analyzed.
The CVDI is a virtual enterprise between UL Lafayette’s School of Computing and Informatics and The iSchool at Drexel in Philadelphia, Pa. It is funded by the Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC) program of the NSF, members from industry and government, and university matching funds.
In particular, the CVDI will bring together analytic, visual and perceptual techniques to enhance industry competitiveness within commercial ecosystems such as information and publishing, healthcare, oil and gas, manufacturing, disaster management, revenue and finance, business process intelligence, e-science, real-time supply chain monitoring/visualization, and network analysis.
Only 15 Computer Information and Engineering (CISE) centers exist across the U.S. UL Lafayette and Drexel University now join this elite group with the CVDI, which is the only center in the nation focusing on visual and decision informatics research. In addition, this is the first time in history that a Louisiana university has been designated as a NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center.
For more information about Drexel University and University of Louisiana at Lafayette’s Center on Visual and Decision Informatics (CVDI), please visit the Center’s website.
2) Andrea Forte (PI) and Susan Wiedenbeck (co-PI), Planning Grant: “Open HTML Scaffolded Web Development Toolkit to Support Elementary Computational Literacy,” NSF ($199,991 over 1.5 years)
In this design-based research project, the team is investigating the impact of beginning web development experiences on learners' conceptual models of Web technologies, infrastructure, and computational concepts.
New Funding Opportunities