September 2008 Archives

In blog post is published in the fulfillment of the requirement of IST 590.

Dr. Mary Beth Rosson was born in the state of Alaska, which is located at the northwest point of the North American Continent. She spent 12 years of her childhood there, then she moved to southern United States with her family. She got her B.A in the Trinity University, at San Antonio, Texas, then she got her Ph.D degree in Human Experimental Psychology at University of Texas, Austin, Texas. After that, she began career at IBM T.J Watson Research Center. At IBM, she met her husband, Jack Carroll. They share the same background in psychology and have the same interests in Human Computer Interaction. Together, they make great contribution to the field of HCI. In the year 2007, Dr. Mary Beth Rosson was awarded the honor of ACM Distinguished Scientist.

Personally, Dr. Mary Beth Rosson is very nice and takes good care of her students. I feel very lucky to be one of her students. I am now working as a Teaching Assistant for Dr. Mary Beth Rosson for IST110. Through the interaction with Dr. Mary Beth Rosson, I got to know that she likes watching football. She is a fan of the football team of every city she has lived in. Mary Beth Rosson has lived with her husband and her daughter in New York for 17 years. so New York Giant is her favorite football team.Also she likes watching Nittany Lions of Penn State and Hokies of Virginia Tech.



Mary Beth also like pets. Together with Jack, they have a dog called Kerby, a cat and some fish. Mary Beth likes hiking with Kerby.

Initially, IST was founded as a strategic school to address the new problems in the information era in the late 1990s. The nature that IST came into being in the call of the era, makes IST became very popular with students, industries and researchers. IST began expansion from the very beginning of its birth. Later, School of IST was turned into the College of IST. Throughout the state there are 1,891 students enrolled in IST plus an additional 12,000+ online IST students. The placement rate of undergraduate students between the years 2003-2006 was 94% and the 2006 average starting salary was $56,250. So far, it has been widely admitted that IST is a great success.

Generally, the success of IST has been attributed to the success of the problem-based learning teaching method. In addition to this, I would like to raise another point which I think is also very important for the success of IST.

The other factor that IST's success could be attributed to is IST's emphasis on team work. Recently a friend of mine, who is from another college, had an interview with Johnson&Johnson, which heavily hires IST students. In that interview, Johnson&Johnson asked him three questions, one of them is "Can you describe a situation when you have conflicts with your team members? How did you go through that?"  He was totally caught of guard. He debriefed to me that he had expected that the interviewer would ask such questions, he thought that the interviewer would ask questions related to his major. For him,team collaboration is rare since in their college they almost work on their own. It took him very long time to make up a team collaboration scenario to the recruiters.

But thinking back to IST, I can really understand why IST gradutes are popular with the employers, that is team work and team collaboration is highly valued in IST culture. This message is delivered to freshmen in their first IST course, IST110, and this team collaboration tradition is carried along their four years of study. So, it is very easy for IST students to handle the interview questions of this kind. This team collaboration emphasis contribute a lot to IST's success.

As to the graduate program of IST, I think it has achieved a lot, and it is going to achieve even more because we have great faculty here, and we have great students here. From the core course of IST gradute program, it can be found that IST is really trying very hard to push students to integrated Information, People and Technology altogether. I think so far we are still not sure whether this is an effort worthing doing. Ideally, integration of I,T and P is great. However, practitically, it is really very hard for students, and also, students do not seem to buy that ITP proposition. Students take the I,T,P courses in classes, but after classes, they usually do their own research respectively. T people do their T thing, P people do P thing and I people do I thing. Students from different angles really have few opportunity to work together, because most of the time they do not talk to each other.  So in this case, considering the fact IST is really trying to integrate I,T and P together, then, the current structure of no department is desirable, because if different departments are divided clearly, the chances that people from different department will collaborate decrease ever further.

As to myself, I think I fit into IST because I fit the HCI program, that is why I came here. HCI is really a interdisciplinary program. In the HCI lab, we have students from different fields, computer science, psychology, english, management information system, communication. The phenomenon that people from different field do not talk to each other never occur in HCI.

This is interesting in that in college level, people from different angles do not talk to each other a lot. But in the HCI field, the integration takes place. Why?

I think one factor that might influence the degree of integration is whether they share the same publication venues. For example, in HCI, there are HCI journals and conference. People doing HCI, not matter how backgrounds vary, they are all trying to publish in the place. then the collaboration among them form naturally.

But to IST, faculty from different angles publish papers in different places. thus it is hard for people from different angles to collaborate since publishing a paper in a field that is recognized by his own field is meaningless.

In conclusion, maybe a good way to let people from different angles to collaborate often is to creat a new jounal called "I-Journal".

Science is developed in its own paradigm. So my question is if i‐science is a new paradigm. If it is a paradigm then which paradigm does it replace? What are the fundamentals shared by i‐scientists? From the philosophy of IST's I, T and P triangle, it seems to me that i‐science is not trying to replace previous paradigm. Instead, i‐science is aimed at integrating existing paradigms to form an integrated paradigm called i‐science. After a close look at the philosophy of other schools in the i‐community, we can find that although i‐schools claim to that they "are interested in the relationship between information, technology, and people", they have different approaches to study this relationship. This could also be proved from the curriculum design. It could be found that different ischools have different curriculum design, which means that so far there is not a philosophy or method that is shared by all the ischools. In this sense, i‐schools are pre‐mature as a paradigm.

On the flip side, there is another possibility that i‐science may not be a new paradigm. It is possible that i‐science is just a new development of a normal science. Having no shared philosophy of ideas and method is really very dangerous for the development of a new paradigm. A case in point is the field called "Artificial life"[1]. During the heydays of the "artificial life" movement in the 1980s and 1990s, although there were two or three pieces of strikingly successful work, no people would like to consolidate them. Everyone was trying to do things from scratch in their own way. Without shared philosophy and methods, it is inevitable that the development of this field stops. From the analysis above, we can see that right now the most important thing for i‐science promoters to think is to identify i‐science, to see what the fundamentals of i‐science are, so as to have a shared philosophy among i-schools.

The thing that i-school that attracts me is the fact that i-school is very interdisciplinary. Here, I can have the opportunity to train myself from the angles information, people and technology, to make myself a well developed i-scientist.

I am a Ph.D student now at College of Information Sciences and Technology.
I am doing some research in the area of Human Computer Interaction, Computer Supported Collaborative Work and Mobile Computing.

Human Computer Interaction is interesting because you can always find something cool and fantastic in it.


I just did a comprehensive literature review paper in mobile knowledge management, in which the current issues in mobile knowledge management are identified, and I plan to focus on the context issues in mobile knowledge management for my future research.
A demo mobile knowledge management system(www.mummy-project.org/project.html)


The thing that drives me is the desire to make something that is useful for the public.

Personally, I am a student now studying in the United States.

Here is my heritage map:




I have very broad interests in sports. I play soccer, basketball, racket ball, billiards, etc.
 
Besides sports, I also like  traveling although I have not travel too much. Here is the map of the places I have been to: I will try to find some time and some money to travel to more places in the future:)