Jill Woelfer awarded Graduate School Medal

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

The Graduate School Medal is given "to recognize Ph.D. candidates whose academic expertise and social awareness are integrated in a way that demonstrates an exemplary commitment to the University and its larger community." One doctoral student is chosen annually to receive the award. Jill Palzkill Woelfer's commitment to helping homeless youth and her dissertation research about the use and access to technology by these young people, made her work stand out to the selection committee. "Like all young people, homeless young people use personal technologies, such as mobile phones and music

Joe Tennis and Elisabeth Jones win best poster award

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Doctoral candidate, Elisabeth Jones, and Professor Joe Tennis, received a Best Poster award at the 2012 iConference in Toronto, Canada. Jones and Tennis are working on a new way of conceptualizing relationships between systems for information dissemination throughout history, based on a set of basic attributes or facets. Their winning poster illustrates one way in which these attribute-based relationships might be visualized, as a step toward illuminating novel perspectives on and comparisons between these phenomena. The attribute-based perspective on information dissemination systems he

Joe Tennis and students archive Buddhist monastery material

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Shortly after 5 a.m. each day in July, Joe Tennis and students in his Information School graduate research seminar spent 40 minutes in Zen meditation. It was part of their schedule as archivists at the San Francisco Zen Center. In the course of a day, they might handle rare books and manuscripts or brooms and dust mops -- but their goal was to be mindful. Tennis, an assistant professor, and the six students, who are in the Master of Library and Information Science program, focused much of their work on material associated with Shunryu Suzuki, who in the 1960s invigorated Zen Buddhism in

Junior faculty blaze path forward for iSchool

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

The creativity and expertise of three junior faculty are driving strong iSchool contributions in areas as diverse as interface design, software development and children's developmental health. Assistant Professors Jacob O. Wobbrock, Andrew J. Ko and Julie Kientz are so deeply impacting the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) that the National Science Foundation (NSF) has given all three CAREER awards -- the NSF's prestigious award in support of the most promising young faculty in their respective fields nationwide. As these faculty wrote in interactions magazine (September-October 200

Keeping Found Things Found

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

When information needed to accomplish everyday tasks is scattered in too many places -- multiple computers, phones, e-mail accounts, software tools and Web sites -- managing projects can quickly turn into a disjointed disaster. The Keeping Found Things Found (KFTF) team and iSchool Research Associate Professor William Jones are on a mission to simplify personal information management. Their research works from a deceptively simple premise: Let people describe their projects and the things they wish to accomplish informally and free-hand -- just as they might do in a draft document or a blog

King finds old computers for Paul Allen

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Information School doctoral student Ian King was recently featured in an article in the Wall Street Journal. King's job at the Living Computer Museum in Seattle's SoDo district is to track down old mainframes and data processors from the early days of computers so they can be restored or preserved. It's a job that takes him around the world and that allows him to meet some of computing's earliest programmers. "I'm like a kid in a candy store," said King, who holds a master's degree in computer science from the University of Washington and is currently pursuing his doctorate in the history o

Lassana Magassa receives Google Policy Fellowship

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

iSchool Ph.D. candidate, Lassana Magassa, to work at New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative (OTI) investigating digital inequality in prisons. Established in 2008 and offered to fewer than 20 students each year, Google Policy Fellows are selected based on a candidate's passion for technology and their academic achievements, research and writing skills. Fellows spend the summer working on Internet and technology policy issues at select public interest organizations which are "at the forefront of debates on broadband and access policy, content regulation, copyright and tradema

MLIS student helps Ethiopians turn a new page

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

In a country hit by years of famine, military upheaval, disease and extreme poverty, books are a rarity. Many children in Ethiopia have never held one in their hands. So when the non-profit group Ethiopia Reads (www.ethiopiareads.org) began setting up school libraries for children in the capital city of Addis Ababa, many librarians felt it was their duty to protect new collections - to make sure kids didn't damage or destroy them. "The librarians felt a huge responsibility for keeping the books safe. These are valuable resources," said University of Washington iSchool graduate student Ra

MLIS student takes Jeopardy! challenge

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Some "Jeopardy" contestants spend months devouring tomes, memorizing flash cards, reviewing lists, and poring over deeds of famous historical and literary characters. MLIS student Chloe Horning took a different tack. She prepped for TV's top answer-and-question quiz show by playing games. "I knew trying to memorize everything wouldn't do anything for me. I can't absorb that amount of information, and it would have driven me crazy to try. Plus, I do enough studying in the iSchool," says Horning, who flew to L.A. in February to tape a "Jeopardy" segment that airs later this spring. To b

MSIM interns help launch farmer-friendly start-up

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Orchard farmers in Eastern Washington may seem a world removed from UW iSchool techies in urban Seattle. But marketing consultant Robert Wilkes began mentally linking the two after talking to a pear-farming friend about the economic asymmetry between the growing and processing sides of the orchard business. Fruit growers consign their crop to a local "packer," the middlemen who wash, sort, grade, pack, cold store, and sell their crop. Packers make money on volume and can turn a profit even in a down year. Growers are sensitive to market prices and face higher risks. And while some use multi

Music in harmony with technology

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

The trove is vast: Fifty years of audio recordings. A dozen cabinets stuffed floor to ceiling with musical scores and other material. More than 1,300 cardboard boxes filled with photographs, scrapbooks and business records. And that's not all. So what do you do with 107 years of Seattle Symphony history, particularly when it needs to be professionally organized and preserved? You round up archivists and library science experts from the UW. You also round up money to get the organizing done. The project began in May 2009, when Lorraine Bruce, a senior lecturer at the UW Informati

Nancy Pearl supports iSchool scholarship fund through Amazon partnership

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

When book maven Nancy Pearl talks about her favorite reading, either to groups or on National Public Radio, she and her audience sometimes get frustrated because some of those books are out of print. Now, as the result of a deal with Amazon.com, at least 12 of Pearl's favorite novels will soon be back in print, and a portion of sales will benefit the UW scholarship Pearl and her husband endowed in 2011. Amazon.com recently announced Book Lust Rediscoveries, which will offer its first novel April 3 to be followed by a new one every two months. Pearl has chosen and written an introduction

Pamela Kilborn-Miller is a champion for change

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

In 2010, Seattle became the first city in the world to affirm the Charter for Compassion, a proclamation that calls on people everywhere, of every faith, to restore the ancient Golden Rule to the center of religious and civic life: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. To date, more than 85,000 individuals from around the world have affirmed the Charter. It has been translated into 35 languages since becoming one of the TED community's "ideas worth spreading" in 2008. Working behind the scenes to help the TED Prize team drive this fast-growing movement is iSchool alumna Pame

Patroling a predatory playground

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Thieves, extortionists, and a host of other undesirables prowl the Internet. They want your wallet, your retirement account, your identity. They represent not just a nuisance but a threat. And if you're like most Internet users, you don't have a clue, warns the iSchool's . "Most people are really good people, and they can't even think like a criminal," says the director for the iSchool's Center for Information Assurance and Cybersecurity (CIAC). "The average person blithely jumps on the Internet and goes about conducting business, trusting that it's safe. It's anything but." The FBI tall

Record year for iSchool, dub at CHI 2011

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

This year marks the most successful year to date for the University of Washington at CHI, the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. CHI is the premiere forum for research results in the interdisciplinary field of human-computer interaction (HCI). The UW's multi-departmental group in HCI and Design, called dub, had authors on 35 of 57 papers accepted at CHI (61 percent), whose overall acceptance rate was just 26 percent. For an entire university to have such a high acceptance rate overall is nothing shy of astounding, and puts UW at the top among institutions submitting to CHI i