New Awards

2017 Awards to iSchool Faculty: S chool of Information Studies faculty won new and incremental grant amounts in calendar year 2017 for their innovative research projects as follows. NEW AWARDS: 2.6 Million

Grant title: Improving the Structure of Online Breakout Activities Using Pair Programming Techniques Grantor: 2U 2017 Amount: $13,851 (Anticipated Award: $13,851) PI: Jeffrey Saltz, associate professor

The research explores the impact of different approaches for student work styles in online breakout groups. It uses data science programming tasks in a controlled experiment to understand how varied approaches create effective student learning and student attitudes. The project also looks at collaborative task completion (distributed pair programming) as compared to informal team collaborations or having students work by themselves. Findings will be useful for how online instructors assign tasks to student breakout groups.

Grant title: Transition Resilience: Navigating Invisible Crises with ICTs Grantor: National Science Foundation 2017 Amount: $173,205 (Anticipated Award: $173,205) PI: Bryan Semaan, assistant professor

This research looks at how veterans returning home from war use information and communication technologies (ICTs), such as social and mobile media, to manage invisible crises in transition, such as unexpected or unusual dislocations that challenge ordinary means of solving problems. While technologies can improve peoples’ resilience to disruptions, there presently is a lack of understanding of how ICTs enable resiliency. The project looks at how transitions happen and how ICTs can help improve the designs of technologies, advance training and education for transition and influence policies. Grant Title: Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Connectivity Index (EECI) Grantor: Whitman School, Syracuse University (Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation) 2017 Amount: $12,206 (Anticipated Award: $12,206) PI: Alejandro Amerzcua, Whitman School of Management Additional Investigators:

Jeffrey Saltz, associate professor, School of Information Studies with Jesse Lecy (Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs); Kira Reed, Whitman School

This research studies the multiple dimensions of entrepreneurial ecosystems and their contribution to economic growth. Goals include: 1) Developing an index of entrepreneurial connectivity at the regional level and test it in three metropolitan statistical areas; 2) Exploring the regulatory entrepreneurial ecosystem and identifying configurations of policies that foster and promote entrepreneurial growth regionally; 3) Evaluating whether programs like business incubators, accelerators, and science parks contribute to high-tech industry concentrations and diversification of economic specialization.

Grant Title: Access to the Gig Economy: Infrastructural Competence and the Participation of Underrepresented Populations Grantor: National Science Foundation (EAGER grant) 2017 Amount: $52,299 (Anticipated Award: $52,299) PI: Steven Sawyer, professor

In this project, researchers want to advance understanding of how people from disadvantaged backgrounds pursue work in the “gig economy” (such as contract work in programming and writing) and how they obtain, assemble and organize digital resources to accomplish their jobs. Goals include creating a better understanding of what is needed to make “gig” work successful; identifying particular challenges and needs of workers who come from disadvantaged backgrounds; and developing better data collection on contract or gig workers and the alternative uses of their digital platforms, applications, and devices. The research will contribute to expectations for training and preparing a digitally-enabled workforce of the future.

Grant Title: Designing Future Library Leaders Grantor: Institute of Museum and Library Studies 2017 Amount: $92,477 (Anticipated Award: $92,477) PI: Rachel Ivy Clarke, assistant professor 1 2 3 4 5 6 $6.29

$5.78 $2.57 $1.78

$1.64 $4.14 7 8

2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 Amounts Awarded (in Millions) Fiscal Year Grant Dollars Received FY 2012 – 2017 by the iSchool at SU

Library leaders in the 21st century need to be collaborative, creative, socially innovative, flexible and adaptable problem solvers—skills evident in design. As libraries foster new innovative organizational cultures, design thinking, methods and principles are an integral part of this paradigm shift.

This grant funds the convening of a Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian National Forum incorporating design thinking, methods and principles into master’s-level library education, then sharing those materials on the web. Goals are: 1) a review of current design approaches in library education and practice; 2) a national forum on design in master’s-level library education; 3) producing recommendations for ways educators can incorporate design thinking into their own courses and programs.

Grant Title: Library Integration in Institutional Learning Analytics Grantor: Institute of Museum and Library Studies 2017 Amount: $99,876 (Anticipated Award: $99,876) PI: Megan Oakleaf, associate professor

This one-year National Forum grant is designed to increase academic library involvement in institutional learning analytics and develop a detailed plan to prepare academic libraries to engage in using data to support student learning and success.

Learning analytics use data to improve learning contexts and help learners succeed, while helping educators discover, diagnose and predict challenges to learning and achieve successful interventions. This project spearheads creating the vision, strategies and concrete plans to guide librarian involvement in institutional learning analytics to benefit student learning. Grant Title: Cybersecurity Risks of Dynamic Two-Way Distributed Electricity Markets Grantor: National Science Foundation – Syracuse Center of Excellent grant 2017 Amount: $99,965 (Anticipated Award: $99,965) PI: Jason Dedrick, professor (In conjunction with SU School of Architecture faculty members Tarek Rakha and Elizabeth Krietemeyer)

The U.S. electric grid is being transformed from a one-way channel delivering electricity from central power plants to customers at set prices, toward a distributed grid with two-way flows of information and electricity and dynamic distributed markets. The benefits of distributed markets are potentially great for consumers and utilities, but with those benefits can come significant cybersecurity and privacy risks.

Involving economics, computer science and public policy perspectives, this research seeks to create an event simulation framework model to test and assess the impact of cybersecurity on grid stability, market trust and privacy.

Grant Title: Convergence HTF: A Research Coordination Network to Converge Research on the SocioTechnological Landscape of Work in the Age of Increased Automation Grantor: National Science Foundation (Initial Convergence Award) 2017 Amount: $499,796 (Anticipated Award: $499,796) PI: Kevin Crowston, associate dean for research Co-PI: Ingrid Erickson, assistant professor

The development of new technologies and intelligent, automated machines is rapidly changing the landscape of jobs and work. This grant coordinates convergent research that aims to better understand how both the human and technology sides of this frontier can be designed equitably, with goals of reinforcing positive outcomes and mitigating negative consequences of intelligent machines in work settings.

The grant supports an annual convergence conference highlighting research regarding social-technological landscape of work; a series of workshops to expand and test research ideas as they develop; and establishing and maintaining shared online resources supporting this research community and its efforts.

INCREMENTAL AWARDS

Grant Title: Inclusive privacy: Effective Privacy Management for People with Visual Impairments (CAREER Award) Grantor: National Science Foundation 2017 Amount: $104,593 (Anticipated Award: $866,904) PI: Yang Wang, associate professor

This research involves the designing, implementing and evaluating of novel inclusive authentication methods for cloud and web computing for people with disability conditions as well as people without disability (subproject R3).

The research phase involves meetings with a project group, reviewing relevant literature and conducting exploratory user research. The implementation phase involves participatory design with end users, fast prototyping, pilot testing and formative evaluations. The evaluation phase includes formative and summative evaluations of the new authentication mechanisms, with end users (both people with and without disability) to work on designing and implementing the accessibility open platform in collaboration with the investigators at Carnegie Mellon University.

Grant Title: Improving Grant Reviewing and Scientific Innovation by Linking Funding and Scholarly Literature Grantor: National Science Foundation 2017 Amount: $20,127 (Anticipated Award: $168,712) PI: Daniel Acuna, assistant professor

This project’s goal is creating a web-based tool that produces instantaneous reports upon identifying scientists, their organizations and their topical interests, and capturing information about federal grant award types and funding programs, after sourcing pertinent information from disparate repositories. The project examines approximately 2.6 million grants from the Federal Reporter and a consolidated, multisource dataset of millions of articles from Microsoft Academic Graph. The unified dataset and web tool could revolutionize how program officers evaluate proposals and how researchers find fundable ideas, making science faster, more accurate and less biased. Grant Title: Trackable Reasoning and Analysis for collaboration and Evaluation Grantor: IARPA (U.S. Office of National Intelligence, Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity – CREATE program) 2017 Amount: The first phase of the project is worth $5,215,441, with $1 million awarded in 2017. PI: Jennifer Stromer-Galley, professor With Nancy McCracken, research associate professor and Carsten Oesterlund, associate professor and Lael Schooler (Psychology)

The TRACE project aims to improve reasoning and intelligence analysis through development of a web-based application that leverages the use of structured techniques, crowdsourcing and smart nudging to enhance analysts’ problem-solving abilities and to foster creative thinking. The CREATE(Crowdsourcing Evidence, Reasoning, Argumentation, Thinking and Evaluation) Program) grant goal is to create a reasoning and reporting application that is effective and also appealing to users by making the process intriguing and fun while not interfering with natural reasoning and writing abilities. The project is unique in that it makes use of rigorous testing at every phase of the application using experimental research methods. The effort involves a multidisciplinary team of researchers from Syracuse University, the University of Arizona, Colorado State University and SRC Inc.

TRACE project team at their kickoff meeting.

Grant Title: Glitch Zoo: Teaming Citizen Science with Machine Learning to Deepen LIGOs View of the Cosmos (INSPIRE) Grantor: Northwestern University/National Science Foundation 2017 Amount: $96,900 (Anticipated Award $294,818) PI: Kevin Crowston, associate dean for research, with Carsten Oesterlund, associate professor

This innovative project is developing a citizen science system to support the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (aLIGO), the most complicated experiment ever undertaken in gravitational physics. The research involves coupling human classification with a machine learning model that learns from citizen scientists and guides how information is provided to participants. A novel feature is reliance on volunteers to discover new glitch classes, not just use existing ones. It involves research on the human-centered computing aspects of this socio-computational system, inspiring future citizen science projects and making volunteers engaged partners in scientific discovery.

Grant Title: Disability and Rehabilitation Research Program: Inclusive Cloud and Web Computing Grantor: Carnegie Mellon University (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) 2017 Amount: $173,945 (Anticipated Award $866,904) PI: Yang Wang, assistant professor, with Yun Huang, assistant professor

This project aims to provide people with disabilities, particularly those with visual impairments, with better computer privacy tools. Common tools that indicate secure connections are often designed without considering that they are hard for people with visual impairments to use. To better understand the privacy challenges people with visual impairments face, researchers will study their use of and known privacy concerns around technologies. They’ll also work with people with visual impairments to generate, test and improve a number of design ideas. Finally, they will work to generalize the studies and designs to other populations, including older adults. Goals are to produce inclusive designs for privacy management tools that work better for everyone.

Sarah Inoue and Paul Gandel (center) from the iSchool meet with Effat University administrators.

Grant Title: Cooperative Agreement between Effat University and Syracuse University Grantor: Effat University 2017 Amount: $192,332 (Total awarded 2013 – 2017: $451,823; renewed in 2018) PI: Paul Brian Gandel, professor

This award continues for another year the successful partnership between the iSchool and Syracuse University and Effat University that began in 2013. The iSchool has helped Effat University with its digital literacy and information science course offerings, reviewing curriculum, coursework and programs to assure their offerings are on par with international information field standards. Effat is an all-women’s undergraduate college in Jeddah and the first private, non-profit female university in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.