September 2008 Archives

My advisor, Dr. John Yen.

Today, I am going to have a pleasure of introducing my advisor, Dr. John Yen. He is Associate Dean for research and graduate programs of the College of IST at Penn State, University Park. He is one of the most important and influential persons in IST community. It is really my honor to be his student. As far as I know and understand, he never forces his students to do something. He always asks and looks for volunteers. Even though he is a very busy person, he always helps us in warm words. I like his personality very much, and I admire him. In his spare time, he likes to play table tennis. He also likes to sing a song. I heard that he has a nice Karaoke system in his house. He seems to enjoy his wonderful life.

He is originally from Taiwan. After finishing his B.S. in electrical engineering with honors at National Taiwan University, he moved to California for his master's degree in computer science at University of Santa Clara. He finished his Ph.D. in computer science at University of California, Berkeley under the supervision of Dr. Lotfi Zadeh, the father of fuzzy logic. Surprisingly, Dr. Lotfi Zadeh will be in presenting in our classroom on October 6, 2008 as part of the distinguished lecture series. Click here for detailed information regarding the distinguished lecture. 

Dr. Lotfi Zadeh, The Father of Fuzzy Logic

Dr. John Yen had been in Information Sciences Institute (ISI) at University of Southern California for three years, and became a leading architect of Artificial Intelligence systems. Before joining IST in 2001, he was a Professor of Computer Science at Texas A&M University. He went to Europe for a conference, and met Dr. Lee Giles who suggested him to be part of IST. He was impressed by its visionary challenge, and finally made a hard decision to move to Penn State which is one of the biggest turning points of his life.

He coauthored a textbook, "Fuzzy Logic: Intelligence, Control, and Information" published by Prentice Hall in 1999. His research group is working on extracting knowledge from large-scale social networks and developing models that capture principles about the dynamic growth of large-scale complex networks. Beside this, it is my "unofficial" research project to completely analyze Dr. Yen's large-scale social networks. :)

This time, I would like to talk about the College of IST, Information Sciences and Technology, at Penn State, which was created in 1997. With its first class taught in 1999, Penn State IST is now a leading member of iSchool caucus, which hosted its first ever iConference in 2006.

IST boasts a state-of-the-art building, which can be a bridge and a building at the same time, and was inspired by the Ponte Vecchio in Florence. Spanning a major PA highway, the IST building reflects the philosophy of the program. As Dr. James B. Thomas, the first IST Dean, said: "it represents an intellectual bridge linking education and research to the new needs of society."

The Ponte Vecchio from Wikipedia

Penn State IST Building from Soumya's Album on Picasa

IST has a commitment to interdisciplinary research. Surprisingly, Penn State IST doesn't have any department associated with it, which is its most distinguishable characteristic from other colleges. One of the intentions behind this very flexible structure is to allow people to belong to many areas of research simultaneously. Because of the flexibility resulting from having no department, IST people can belong to many research labs, many projects and many tracks all at the same time. This underlying structure means that IST affiliates cannot help developing their research projects into real interdisciplinary ventures.

There are 50 faculty members and 8 affiliated faculty members in Penn State IST. Their research areas include: Artificial Intelligence and Informatics; Community Informatics; Crisis Management and Emergency Response; Cyber Security and Privacy; Enterprise Knowledge and Process; Geographic Information Systems; Globalization; Health and Bio Informatics; Human Capital in Knowledge Society; Human-Computer Interaction; Information and Image Fusion; Information Policy; Learning and Innovation; Psychology of Terrorism; Information Retrieval; Digital Library; Social Impact and Social Inclusion; and Social Network Analysis. Wow, there are really many interesting topics!

Though there's no department, there are five tracks for graduate students in IST: 1) Computational Informatics Track, 2) Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science Track, 3) Human-Computer Interaction Track, 4) Social and Enterprise Informatics Track, and 5) Security Informatics Track. These tracks are just for guiding IST graduate students to their academic goals; there's no restriction of being involved in other tracks. Some students are being advised by more than one faculty member having different backgrounds. In my case, I am working in the Laboratory for Intelligent Agents, to which eight faculty members and ten students belong. The lab's members' research interests are diverse: AI, security and risk analysis, human-centered computing, information retrieval, psychology, and so on. I am currently working with only one advisor, Dr. John Yen, however, it is very likely that I will be co-advised by another faculty member, because my research interest lies in at least two areas: Artificial Intelligence, and Social Network Analysis.

On a broader note, there's been an interesting alteration in undergraduate education. Across all American universities, technical fields, especially computer science-related fields, have significantly dropped off their enrollments over the last ten years. At present, they are still restricting themselves and cutting off their resources. On the other hand, it's also interesting that this trend hasn't affected iSchools. For just one example, Penn State IST is still steadily growing. To the best of my knowledge, all graduate students of Penn State IST who seek funding get funded, except those who desire to be unfunded. For this reason, I can focus solely on being a brilliant graduate student, and I don't need to divide my loyalties. Thank God and IST!

How can't I fall in love with IST?

We use the term 'interdisciplinary research' quite often. The term 'interdisciplinarity' is often used interchangeably with such terms as multidisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, and crossdisciplinarity. However, they are all different. We need to know the differences among them. Following is the summary of a Wikipedia article. You can find the whole text on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interdisciplinary

1)      Interdisciplinarity

·         Made up of people from multiple disciplines and professions

·         They create and apply new knowledge as they work together.

·         They are equal stakeholders in addressing a common challenge.

2)      Multidisciplinarity

·         The act of joining together two of more disciplines without integration

·         Example: A panel presentation on the many faces of the AIDS pandemic (medicine, politics, epideminology) in which each section is given as a stand-alone presentation.

3)      Crossdisciplinarity

·         The act of crossing disciplinary boundaries

·         To explain one subject in the terms of another, foreign subject or method

·         Common examples: 1) Studies of the physics of music, 2) The politics of literature.

4)      Transdisciplinarity

·         It doesn't have a stable, consensus meaning yet.

·         Usage suggests that a transdisciplinary approach dissolves boundaries between disciplines. Most uses of the term suggest a deliberate and intentionally scandalous or transgressive violation of disciplinary rules, for the purpose of achieving new insight, or of expanding the discipline's resources.

·         Made up of transdisciplinary professionals, which is an ideal that can only be approached and never achieved.

  (ischools.org)

iSchools provide emergent academic programs. iSchools are emerging because we now live in the age of information. There are contemporary challenges of ubiquitous information. We also notice rapid technical and social changes. iSchools focus on the relationship between information, technology and people which is characterized by a commitment to learning and understanding the role of information in human endeavors.(

There are 21 members in the iSchool caucus, and most of those are in the U.S. iConference, an annual conference of iSchools, has been hosted by Pennsylvania State University, University of Michigan, and UCLA. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_I-Schools)

1. What makes I-schools different than more traditional departments, colleges, fields?

Interdisciplinary nature, Real world problem solving, and various perspectives. I-Schools promote an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the opportunities and challenges of information management, with a core commitment to concepts like universal access and user-centered organization of information. The field is concerned broadly with questions of design and preservation across information spaces, from digital and virtual spaces like online communities and databases to physical spaces such as libraries, museums, collections, and other repositories. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_I-Schools)

2. What are some of the things that most I-schools have in common?

Interdisciplinary research would be one of the most common things in iSchools. Popular research topics in iSchools include human-computer interaction, medical informatics, semantic web, and social informatics.

3. What are some of the different flavors of I-schools?

Some iSchools have a strong legacy in library studies because their programs are former Library Science.

4. Why did you choose to do your graduate education at an I-school?

"You cannot connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. That approach has never let me know, and it has made all the difference in my life." said Steve Jobs as commencement address at Stanford. I realized that all my diverse experiences, skills, and knowledge I have obtained so far have made a perfect iSchool Ph.D. student. It was just "connecting-the-dot" moment according to Steve Jobs' address.

I was selected as one of the 27 delegates of the Qualcomm IT Tour among engineering students in Korea. At the meeting with Dr. Paul Jacobs, the CEO of Qualcomm Incorporated, "leadership" was the most critical word he emphasized. Just like Dr. Jacobs, I have also sought to enlarge my range of thoughts with an aggressive attitude toward diverse challenges that I have encountered. In this context, I would like to emphasize that my pursuit of further graduate study in IST stems especially from my passion and intellectual interest for the field. It does not mean that I think light of certain societal contribution that my achievement might make. Rather, I am interested in presenting science and technology in a widely understandable form so that more people can benefit from them than the do now.

The paramount drive for my academic work is the happiness and endless intellectual curiosity I feel whenever I study. It has hardly been thinkable to imagine myself not engaged in scientific inquiry of some sort since the beginning of my undergraduate years. Hopefully, you will notice that I am very accustomed to working "together" with others, within my field or not. I enjoy seeking their diverse approaches to one single topic. Since I am already familiar with the diversity of the communities where I have been affiliated, I will be able to contribute to that within my intended field. While working for a multinational enterprise, I have had a lot of experiences of working in partnership with other institutions in many foreign countries. Collaborative work gave me a chance to immerse myself in various cultures, ways of thinking, and manners of work.

Moreover, these experiences allowed me to stand in others' position, as opposed to mine, and to draw the best consensus through effective discussion with them. Having a frank conversation in a tea break was a very good way of resolving conflicts and misunderstandings. Most importantly, I realized that I myself first need to open my mind to communicate with others, wherever they are from, or whatever ways of feeling and thinking they have. As you know, people are basically of the same nature wherever they are from.

Finally, I have some ideas in the hope of benefiting the educationally underrepresented general public. I think that science and technology should not be owned by a certain class exclusively. This is because, as far as I believe, science and technology are the gifts given to all the people in the world. There is a strong sense in which the mass of the people in our society have little chance to benefit from it, educationally or otherwise. This problem strongly motivates me to write some scientific books that can be understood easily, and help build museums or hold exhibitions of them in days to come so that everyone is blessed to access these facilities without difficulty.

Looking back what I have done so far, I tried lots of things following where my enthusiasm headed for at the moment - researching in information retrieval on a new type of a web crawler, developing an intelligent information, developing intelligent mobile applications for cell phones, and finally improving an existing system that optically inspects and repairs TFT-LCD panels. These were probably a desperate attempt to look for what I really want to do, because I always believed that it would be the single best way I could be truly successful in my life. Unfortunately, I simply could not find the very thing even after years of searching.

Only very recently, however, did I realize that I found it. It was even more amazing when I also found that all my diverse experiences, skills, and knowledge I have obtained during my undergraduate years made me a perfect Ph.D. student for research and development in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University where I will be able to apply my strengths to.

I wanted to do for my life and what my next step should be. It did not take a long time for me to decide that I wanted to become a researcher. Judging from my innate curiosity and passion for creating something useful, I simply could not find a better job. It was rather like I was destined to become one. It followed that the Laboratory for Intelligent Agents became my choice for further research. As for research interests, since I have always thought that the degree to which we find and keep knowledge and information has a lot to improve, I want to work on the research by which I can bridge the gap between the information technology and the information needs of people.

After my graduate study, I will stay wherever I can pursue my research interests further and deliver the results of research to other people. The first consideration will be staying in the academia where I can focus on building theoretical foundations and experimental systems, while having impacts upon students and the community. Also, I am excited at the opportunities to teach and advise students in learning new things, finding what they want. Especially, based on my own experience, I will support students in difficulty with extra care so that they can stretch and achieve their dream.

Hi! My name is Hyun-Woo (Anthony) Kim. I am from South Korea. I am a first year Ph.D. student of the Pennsylvania State University at University Park. I am majoring in information sciences and technology (IST). I am currently working with Dr. John Yen at The Laboratory for Intelligent Agents. I received my B.S. in computer science from Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea. I am interested in social network analysis, artificial intelligence, and information retrieval. Basically, I like to collect huge amount of data, do some analysis, and finally extract useful information.