LAB REPORT
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them, adapt to new situations and find camaraderie and support, Semaan notes. “I’m seeing more and more that veterans are developing their own online technology-centered systems that are directly related to gaps in what they’re provided by society upon their return,” he says. “Using online tools and technologies, people are self-organizing to build resilience for themselves and their community.” Semaan’s research delves specifically into how the technologies help people adapt, decide which ICT resources to use and employ tech to transact social and informational support. He also is examining how online support spaces are structured and sustained and he is identifying the requirements and designs for new ICTs that support transition resilience. The research combines several periods of intense data collection using both semi-structured interviews and observations of online data, such as social media communications. It also includes a participatory design and diary study that will inform the initial development and evaluation of a new ICT that can empower veterans to detect, make sense of and navigate invisible crises, he says. Semaan hopes the findings help create guidelines for training, education and policies to support veterans’ transitions to their non-military lives. Those findings should be transferrable to the issues of other groups undergoing personal and social transition, he believes. With his interests at the crossroads of sociology and humancomputer interaction, Semaan says the BITS Lab is perfectly suited to this research. “The ethos of social good and social responsibility as a researcher is what the BITS Lab means to me. I think a critical intersection for all of us is thinking very deeply and critically about technology, thinking more broadly about technology’s impact, and how technology can be a source of social change and social good.” n
Principal Investigator: Professor Jian Qin Metadata Lab is a research group that studies a wide range of topics related to metadata with two focus areas: big metadata analytics and metadata modeling and linking.
BIG METADATA ANALYTICS Researchers focus on understanding scholarly communication processes by using metadata (from data repositories and other databases) as the source to investigate the structures and dynamics of collaboration and intellectual networks. They also study the impact of such networks on scientific capacity and knowledge diffusion. Projects include: l Discovering Collaboration Network Structures l Dynamics in Big Data l Cyberinfrastructure-Enabled Collaboration Networks.
METADATA MODELING AND LINKING This research area examines big metadata residing in data repositories. Tracking and analyzing how research data in different repositories and/or different stages of a research lifecycle are related and linked permits development of models to represent domain knowledge networks for metadata applications. Projects include: l Metadata modeling for gravitational wave research data management l Metadata portability and relation typology. The initiatives employ a wide variety of methods and tools that are often highly computational and sometimes at a very large scale. Research in both big metadata analytics and metadata modeling and linking creates pathways for the two to dive deeper in the networks of collaboration and knowledge diffusion and benefit each other’s pursuit for new discoveries and knowledge.
THE iSCHOOL @ SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY
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