iSchool professor, refugee youths work to aid others through technology

Monday, December 28, 2015

iSchool Professor Karen Fisher has worked with immigrant and refugee youth from all over the world, including East Africa, Myanmar and Latin America, but something keeps drawing her back to the Za’atari Refugee Camp, just across the border from Syria in Jordan. “Everywhere you look, there’s children,” Fisher said. “Their optimism and creativity is boundless.” In two visits to the Za’atari camp in 2015, Fisher found the conditions were dire and cramped, but young people were eager to help with her research, which focuses on how ethnic minority youth help others through infor

MLIS alumnus's passion and advocacy make a difference in the classroom

Monday, December 28, 2015

For 15 years, Steve Coker, MLIS ’06, was an English, Social Studies, and (occasional) Spanish teacher. And then he discovered technology. His tinkering became a passion, and Coker took a leadership role in bringing instructional technology to his and his colleagues’ classrooms. “I became the default ‘tech guy,’” he jokes. He really had no intention of becoming a librarian until a fellow teacher recommended the iSchool’s then-hybrid MLIS program (in-person and online). After doing a bit of research, Coker thought, “this is me.” Coker graduated from the iSchool in 2006

Katie Davis recognized as 2015 Rising Star

Wednesday, December 23, 2015

The Association for Psychological Science (APS) named University of Washington Assistant Professor Katie Davis to their distinguished 'Rising Star' list of outstanding international psychological scientists. Davis, who works for the UW Information School, studies how the worlds of adolescents are being remade – in both promising and troubling ways – by digital media, and the conditions that catalyze positive outcomes. “It’s an enormous honor to have my work recognized in this way by the Association for Psychological Science,” says Davis. “This recognition demonstrates an appr

Students tackle real-world problems in Informatics projects

Tuesday, December 22, 2015

Students in the Information School’s Intellectual Foundations of Informatics (INFO 200) and Client-side Web Development (INFO 343) courses showed their final projects in a pair of open houses on Dec. 9 and 10. In INFO 200, students work in teams on a quarter-long project where they identify a problem, do user research, and consider the social and ethical issues, then design and prototype a solution. Students presented their work to iSchool faculty and visitors in the Commons at Mary Gates Hall. Among the INFO 200 students’ project prototypes: an app to crowdsource reports of potholes

TASCHA promotes mobile literacy in developing countries

Thursday, December 17, 2015

As millions of people come online across the globe through mobile devices, many have leapfrogged from traditional media to digital devices that provide instant access to information.  Mobile information literacy is vital for them to learn how to find and evaluate the quality and credibility of information obtained online, understand how to create and share online information effectively, and participate safely and securely. The Information School’s Technology & Social Change Group, along with its partners at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, has laun

Three iSchool alumnae chosen as ALA Emerging Leaders

Tuesday, December 15, 2015

Master of Library and Information Science alumni Alpha DeLap, ’13, Alyssa Jocson Porter, ’13 and Katherine Donaldson, ’14, have been named to the American Library Association Emerging Leaders Class of 2016. The ALA Emerging Leaders Program seeks to develop leadership skills in library workers early in their careers. The 50 participants from across the country gather for problem-solving work groups and peer networking, gain an inside look into ALA structure, and have an opportunity to serve the profession in a leadership capacity. The prestigious program puts participants on the fast t

iSchool's DataLab works to bridge a knowledge gap for researchers

Tuesday, December 8, 2015

The iSchool’s DataLab has partnered with JSTOR, a nonprofit digital library, to help close a gap in the understanding of scholarly work. For scholars working in interdisciplinary fields, it can be daunting to navigate literature outside their areas of expertise. An algorithm developed by the DataLab, combined with an index of more than 1,500 key terms provided by JSTOR, aims to help researchers introduce themselves to topics and publications from other fields quickly and easily. The results of their work have been incorporated into JSTOR Sustainability, a new site that contains scholar

iSchool Informatics program helps to narrow tech gender gap

Tuesday, December 1, 2015

When a BBC interviewer recently asked a group of high-school girls if they’d be comfortable working in technology, they answered adamantly, unanimously: “No.” Commented one: “It’s not really a woman’s field.” Statistically speaking, that statement is true. It should be a woman’s field. It used to be a woman’s field. But in 2015 numbers show that it is not, and that many women no longer feel they belong in it. “That has really changed over the last decades in a direction we would not want it to go,” says University of Washington iSchool Assistant Professor Katie Davis.

iSchool research estimates poverty and wealth from cell phone metadata

Tuesday, December 1, 2015

In developing or war-ravaged countries where government censuses are few and far between, gathering data for public services or policymaking can be difficult, dangerous or near-impossible. Big data is, after all, mainly a First World opportunity. But cell towers are easier to install than telephone land lines, even in such challenged areas, and mobile or cellular phones are widely used among the poor and wealthy alike. Now, researchers with the University of Washington Information School and Computer Science and Engineering Department have devised a way to estimate the distribution of we

MLIS student selected as ARL Leadership Fellow

Tuesday, November 24, 2015

Brian Keith, a student in the iSchool’s Master of Library and Information Science program, has been selected as one of the Association of Research Libraries’ 2016-17 Leadership Fellows. Keith, who is Associate Dean for Administrative Services and Faculty Affairs at the University of Florida, will be immersed in leadership training as part of the ARL program, which is designed to develop senior-level leaders in large research libraries and archives. Leadership fellows build learning plans, shadow library directors, and engage in discussions about their work. The program, which begins

iSchool awarded grant to pursue global economic development

Thursday, November 12, 2015

The University of Washington Information School has been awarded a Grand Challenges Explorations grant to pursue an innovative global health and development research project. The $100,000 grant, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will go toward Assistant Professor Joshua Blumenstock’s project titled “Billions of transactions, thousands of photos: Combining mobile network operator data with crowd-sourced photographs to measure the availability and use of digital financial services.” Blumenstock’s team, in partnership with Premise Data, will use two unconventional s

Informatics alum's futuristic mirror in the spotlight

Wednesday, November 4, 2015

When Informatics alumnus Evan Cohen looks in the mirror, he sees a guy whose invention is getting a lot of attention. Cohen’s “mirror of the future” responds to voice commands to display things like the time and temperature, city maps and custom messages. It can also control the lighting in his room. Cohen, who now works at Microsoft, built the prototype in a weekend and spent a little time polishing its interface before turning out a quick video that’s been viewed more than 150,000 times on YouTube and 900,000 more on Facebook. "The bugs are fairly minimal but I have a la

Life, enhanced: UW professors study legal, social complexities of an augmented reality future

Wednesday, November 4, 2015

Augmented reality is the enhancement of human perception through overlaying technologies that can expand, annotate and even record the user’s moment-to-moment experience. (Photo by Leonard Low / Wikimedia commons.) Those designing coming augmented reality systems should make them adaptable to change, resistant to hacking and responsive to the needs of diverse users, according to a white paper by an interdisciplinary group of researchers at the University of Washington’s Tech Policy Lab. Though still in its relative infancy, augmented reality promises systems that can aid people with

Research aims to better inform patients and physicians

Tuesday, November 3, 2015

iSchool Professor Wanda Pratt has seen the danger of medical errors first-hand. In 2013, her husband became ill and went to the emergency room with an abnormal heart rate and rhythm. He was given a drug and sent home, where his blood pressure bottomed out and his heart rate slowed to 20 beats per minute. He spent the next week in intensive care for what was eventually diagnosed as Lyme disease. The drug he had been given was contraindicated for his situation and had made his condition much worse. Pratt’s husband recovered completely, but their story is all too common. A 2013 study

iSchool producing media mentors, Ph.D. student writes in ParentMap

Monday, November 2, 2015

“How much screen time is right for my child?” “Will my child be behind in school if we don’t have in iPad at home?” “Where do I find guidelines to manage my family’s media use? iSchool Ph.D. student J. Elizabeth Mills tackles those questions in an article she co-authored for ParentMap, pointing to libraries and the librarians produced by the iSchool as great resources for parents. Here is an excerpt: “The profession of children’s librarianship has undergone a major shift in the past few years, precipitated by changes in the communities served by children’s libra