Syracuse iSchool faculty and students are well represented at the 2009 iConference

Syracuse University School of Information Studies faculty and students will share their expertise at the fourth annual iConference at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, February 8 through 11. This year’s iConference theme is iSociety: research, education, engagement.

Syracuse University iSchool members will be presenting on a range of topics in 15 sessions throughout the conference. Their papers and presentations will explore such subjects as gaming, privacy and trust, intellectual property, international information issues, green IT, and national security, among other areas.

Thirteen Syracuse iSchool doctoral students will be among the 77 selected to present posters this year. The posters showcase the students’ groundbreaking research on a variety of issues, including national culture and knowledge sharing, older adults and e-literacy, web advertising and impact on information seeking, online collaboration and group dynamics, search engine technologies, information sharing among law enforcement agencies, and information access and government.

The 2009 iConference opens with a Doctoral Colloquium that brings together Ph.D. students from of iSchool-related disciplines and iSchool faculty to gather feedback and generate discussions about their current research projects or thesis work. At the same time, the conference is sponsoring a Junior Faculty Mentoring Session for tenure-track faculty to meet with senior iSchool faculty, including Syracuse’s Martha Garcia-Murillo and Ping Zhang, and have informal dialogue about emerging intellectual communities within the information field.

The following day, participants will hear from Jose-Marie Griffiths, dean of the School of Information and Library Science at UNC, and UNC Chancellor Holden Thorp, who will deliver the opening plenary presentation. The closing plenary presentation features Edward Seidel, director of the National Science Foundation’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure and Floating Point Systems Professor in Louisiana State University’s Department of Physics.

At the conclusion of the conference, Syracuse Professor Steve Sawyer and his co-organizers will lead a four-hour workshop on “The Science of Socio-Technical Systems in iSchools.” The workshop hopes to explore and begin to frame a future research agenda based on socio-technical research in the information field.

The 2009 iConference is sponsored by the National Science Foundation and organized by the iCaucus, a group of information schools from the United States and Canada dedicated to exploring the relationship of information, technology, and people, and to advancing the understanding of the role of information in human endeavors. For more information, visit http://www.ischools.org/iconferences/2009index/.