September 2008 Archives

My advisor is Dr. John Yen.

Frankly, I don't know a lot about his personal life. There are two possible reasons: first, I have been working with him for only a year; second, during the past year, I didn't really have many chances to learn more about him because he is too busy. The only long and casual conversation we had, through which I learned something about his family and life, was at the Graduate Recruitment Events in March 2007, when I met him for the first time. I learned more about him little by little throughout the past year, but still, not much.

He was originally from Taiwan and has been in the US for almost 30 years. His wife Michelle is also from Taiwan. He has two kids. His son graduated from Penn State's Smeal business school and is now at Harvard Law School for graduate course works. His daughter is attending college in California.

As far as I know, he likes to sing songs. He has a set of very good Karaoke system at home with a lot of popular Chinese songs.

We have been talking about iSchools and the different flavors of iSchools. Now the question is what about IST?

IST is certainly a special type of iSchool as it was built from scratch with a clear focus on the I-T-P triangle, while a lot of other iSchools evolved from traditional disciplines. I have the impression that IST is among the most diverse iSchools as it hosts researchers who come from various academic backgrounds and conduct research on a VERY broad range of topics.

Team 2 talked about the prestige of IST faculty members in their presentations but what they showed in the slides were actually how diverse the faculty body is. In fact, it is tricky to evaluate the reputation of the schooo and an IST faculty member, because IST is too diverse and faculty members from different backgrounds tend to have different criteria in evaluating the acedemic achievement of peers. I guess this is also a challenge for a lot of iSchools. This leads to another question: should IST have departments?

Having departments and grouping researchers from similar areas may make the evaluation and tenure awarding a little bit easier. However, this may hurt the identity of  IST as a college. People may say that the college is just a clearinghouse where there is a group of social scientists and another group of computer scientists doing research on some new topics in the Age of Information.

If IST have departments, a challenge is to decide where people fit, as IST researchers are so inter-disciplinary that it is often difficult to describe them with a single  label. For example, assume the departments are based on the PhD tracks of the new curriculum, I am not really sure which track I should pick... My  research on intelligent agents and agent-based model have the origin in AI, not cognitive science though. Depending on the application area, it may also overlap with computational informatics and social/organizational informatics. I guess similar problems may also occur to some faculty members, as well as PhD students.

Actually, the recent reallocation of faculty offices based on research interests and the new PhD curriculum with tracks may signal the administration's  preference on a more grouped structure within the college. I am not sure whether it is a good or bad thing but let's see how this works out.

What's special about iSchool?

Intuitively, iSchools conduct research concerning information. However, iSchool research tends to be more interdisciplinary than traditional disciplines, such as library science and computer science. Most iSchool researchers often consider a topic from the perspectives of people, technology and information, which constitute the triangular research theme at Penn State IST.

 

What are some of the things that most iSchools have in common?

As we mentioned before, iSchools aim at integrating people, information and technology to study phenomenon in the modern information society. One of the popular research domains in the iSchool community is Human Computer Interaction, which studies topics such as how to use technology to help human users to better find, understand and utilize the information provided by computing systems. Other commonly found topics include social and organizational informatics, information (knowledge) retrieval and management, and so on.

 

Another thing that I guess most iSchools have in common is the challenge in establishing academic identity. Let's put away the philosophy about what is a scientific discipline, pragmatically, I tend to use whether iSchools hire PhD students as faculty members from other iSchools as one of the many ways to assess the iSchool movement. If iSchools keep hiring PhDs from other disciplines while iSchool PhDs can only go to the industry, our iSchool is more like a professional training program, instead of an academic discipline. I guess the situation is getting better now but I am not 100% sure about that.

 

Another way to evaluate the maturity of an academic discipline is whether it has its own community of closely related researchers and highly respected publication outlets. So far, most iSchool researchers still tend to publish their works in venues of their own traditional specialty. This leads to the fact that, for example, Dr.Yen and Dr.Giles is still considered by many as compute scientists, instead of information scientists.

 

OK, enough challenges for iSchools to handle:)

 

What are some of the different flavors of iSchools?

This section reflects my own perception and understanding of the iSchool community. I judge the flavors of iSchools mostly based on their academic tradition.

 

Among the iSchool caucus, there are a lot of members who evolve from library science departments/schools, such as the iSchools at University of Michigan, University of Illinois and University of North Carolina. Therefore, they have a flavor in studying archiving and preservation of books, information for schools and communities, migration, management and accessibility of digital libraries.

 

iSchools at Georgia Tech and UC Irvine have strong backgrounds in computer science. Their research has a lot to do with algorithms and optimization techniques for information processing (as in bioinformatics), technologies for ubiquitous computing, computer vision and graphics.

 

There are also iSchools who focus more on the business side, such as UC Berkeley and Singapore Management University's iSchools. They are similar to the Management Information System department of business schools and have a preference over organizational informatics and database management research.

 

Besides, UCLA's iSchool is housed together with its education department and thus considers information as way to aid learning and assess/evaluate the outcome of learning. Carnegie Mellon's iSchool is actually a public policy school, which intuitively emphasizes on technology policy analysis and technology management.

 

Why did I choose IST?

Well, I would say it is mostly because of family reasons. Penn State is the last school that both my wife and I applied for, mainly because of State College's geographical location. I have some very basic ideas about what an iSchool is when I applied for PhD programs but I did not know IST is such a program.

 

Life is like a box of chocolate. It turned out Penn State is the only school that admitted both of us and we don't want to be far away from each other for 4-5 years. I had the choice to go to two traditional computer science programs or a more policy-oriented program. She also got another offer from a pretty good school. During the campus visit in February 2007, I got to know the college and became concerned with my academic identity at IST. However, I was also impressed by the hospitality, academic diversity and the friendly atmosphere in the college. After my wife got her offer from Penn State, we decided to come here together. Making decisions can often be tough, but sometimes, it is unbelievably easy:)

 

What are the consequences of an old story archived at a Floridan newspaper's website being discovered or re-discovered by Google's crawlers? Ask United.

Major players: Bloomberg, a reporter at a Miami-based finance consulting company, Google, the Sun-Sentinel's website, and United Airline.

Detailed story:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/08/AR2008090803063.html

Second thoughts after laughing:
How should we treat information discovered on the Web? How should we store time-critical information on the Web? How could imperfect information technologies and information policies used by Internet giants like Google and Bloomberg affect the world?

What drives me to pursue a Ph.D.? Well, it is hard to say. I don't seem to be driven by noble motivations, such as world peace or the welfare of human beings. I would guess there are two things that lead me to the doctoral program.

First, it might be my family and life experience. Both my father and my uncle are professors. They are well respected and set models of success for me when I was a kid. I grew up in a university campus. Most of my neighbors and a great number of my family's friends are professors or work for the university. I guess this influenced my perception of what a good life is like, and thus my decision to go for a doctorate degree with the hope of getting a position in academia after graduation.

Second, it is my interest in doing research. While working as a programmer, I sometimes got bored with doing the same stuff repeatedly everyday. Research thus draws my attention as a way to discover new things. Although I am often considered as a "techy person", I have a broad range of interests and enjoying read about various subjects, including politics, business and history. Therefore, I've been expecting an opportunity to to integrate knowledge from different disciplines. That might be one of the reasons why I applied for this program, because IST hosts a diverse body of faculty members and provides a good environment for interdisciplinary research.

I am now a second year Ph.D. student at IST. My research interests include intelligent agents and computational organizational science, especially multi-agent coalition formation and agent-based networks. At the Intelligent Agent Laboratory of IST, I work with Dr.Yen, Dr.Maitland and Dr.Tapia. My research mainly focuses on multi-agent models for inter-organization coordination (NSF Project COHORT).

Prior to joining IST, I conducted research on agent-based models for urbanization and post-disaster recovery at the Institute for Geospatial Research and Education (2004-2006).

I received an M.S. in Computer Science from the Department of Computer Science at the Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, MI. I hold a B.E. in Information Engineering from the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT), Beijing, China. I also worked for more than a year as a programmer at a mid-size company in Ann Arbor, MI.

More information about my research and academic background can be found on my personal website: www.kangzhao.net.

My hometown is Tai'an in the Shandong Province of China. The area has a long history of human civilization, dating back to 4100BC. The city is now built around the Mount Tai, which is considered by many as the most famous mountain in Chinese history and culture. People there are heavily influenced by Confucianism as the home town of Confucius is only 40 miles away.

After high school, I went to college in Beijing, where I met my wife, whose college is an immediate neighbor of mine. We then came to the U.S. together in 2004 and spent 3 years in southeastern Michigan before moving to Penn State together in 2007.

Although I've spent so many years in schools, my life is more than study. I watch a lot of sports. While I was in China, it was soccer all the time. After coming to the U.S., I also adopted football, basketball and, sometimes, baseball. Like many Chinese, I play soccer, table tennis and badminton, just for pleasure. I play video games occasionally, although I'm far from being a serious gamer. I also enjoy travelling and experiencing different places. During the past four years, I have visited 12 U.S. states and eight other countries (Italy, France, Germany, Austria, Monaco, San Marino, Vatican City, Canada) besides China and the U.S.