Appreciating Scholar Guests

Visiting Scholars 2017

The iSchool hosted a number of visiting faculty members and doctoral scholars from a range of domestic and international institutions during the year. Guest scholars contributed research efforts, operational functions, course teaching, project proposals and expansion of the iSchool’s inter-school and inter-continental reach over the course of the year. MATTHEW ADIGUN Visiting faculty Faculty Sponsor: Lee McKnight Institution: University of Zululand and United Nations University Position: Senior Professor and Research Leader Country: South Africa Detail: Professors Adigun and McKnight have collaborated for several years. Adigun’s summer 2017 research visit involved further planning for their Syracuse UniversityUniversity of Zululand African national digital transformation project. The effort is expected to begin in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and in Liberia, with potential expansion to other African nations after a pilot phase. Adigun’s United Nations University research on edge-cloud computing in rural Africa is relevant to the project. Plans call for his students, along with students at other African universities and at Syracuse University, to contribute to the project research.

CHARLES (CHRIS) HINNANT Visiting faculty Faculty Sponsor: Steven Sawyer Position: Associate Professor Country: USA

Detail: Professors Hinnant and Sawyer pursued three projects. Two were research-oriented and focused on combining data on information sharing in public safety, and advancing a proposal idea around data sharing in the public sector. A third was instruction-oriented, involving updating and developing material for the iSchool’s course IST 614, Introduction to Managing Information Professionals. Hinnant, whose specialties are information management and policy, social and organizational informatics and public policy and management, led one of the course sections.

AMIRA REZGUI Doctoral student, 2016-2017 Faculty Sponsor: Kevin Crowston Institution: Telecom Bretagne Country: Tunisia (LeBardo) in Northern Africa

Detail: Amira Rezgui is a post-doctoral researcher who is working with Associate Dean for Research Crowston on his stigmergic coordination project. Her role is overseeing field tests of a new system. The research looks at coordination mediated by changes to a shared work product via stigmergy, as opposed to explicit or implicit coordination methods. It examines Wikipedia, as one of the most successful experiments in online collaborative knowledge building, for evidence of stigmergic coordination.

REBEKAH TROMBLE Visiting faculty Faculty Sponsor: Jenny Stromer-Galley Institution: The Institute of Political Science, Leiden University Position: Assistant Professor Country: The Netherlands

Detail: Assistant Professor Tromble researches and teaches on media and politics, with particular interests in public discourse and digital research methods and ethics. She was a visiting scholar at the iSchool’s Center for Computational and Data Sciences in 2017 and has worked with iSchool faculty and others on various assessments of content and community building within social media communication avenues.

SHI YUAN Doctoral student Faculty sponsor: Bei Yu Institution: Beihang University, School of Economics and Management Country: China

Detail: Shi Yuan has participated in Professor Yu’s research project on natural language processing for health information quality, developing algorithms for automatic identification of health claims in online health news. The research helps identify potential quality issues, such as exaggerations, that may appear in health news found online. Shi Yuan and Professor Yu have published papers and made presentations together on the topic. TONG ZENG Doctoral student Faculty sponsor: Daniel Acuna Institution: Nanjing University School of Information Management Country: China

Detail: Supported by the China Scholarship Council, Zeng has been here working with Acuna on building a recommendation system to indicate where citations are needed in a document, then automatically filling in the proper citation. Zeng has completed the first phase by developing a tool that assesses where citations are needed. He is continuing on the second phase of the project. The tool will have uses in academia and will be helpful in determining when documents might be considered “fake news,” if they are lacking supporting reference and citation.

YUELINANG ZENG Doctoral student Faculty sponsor: Jian Qin Institution: iSchool at Wuhan University Country: China

Detail: Zeng’s interest in working with Professor Qin stems from his interest in applying the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) for data management to study the behavior and practices of social sciences researchers in China. The CMM for research data management was a project Qin and Association Dean for Research Kevin Crowston worked on several years ago. Zeng currently is also completing work on his dissertation proposal.