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Assistant Professor Qiaozhu Mei has been awarded a two-year grant from the National Science Foundation to fund his project “Wordsmith in the Cloud: Refining Language Models Using Web-Scale Language Networks.”

The $214,985 award will fund the first attempt to refine language models with Web-scale language networks. The techniques will bridge the gap between cloud computing and text information management using language models. The developed techniques are also expected to solve challenging research problems, such as the construction of heterogeneous language networks from Web-scale corpora, the estimation of tie strengths in language networks, and the regularization of language models with multiple language networks.

Using the power of the Cloud, Qiaozhu and his team will be able to efficiently construct and manage the language networks from Web-scale corpora, steer the regularization framework and the refining processes with these Web-scale language networks, and apply the refined language models to real world text mining applications. The project will produce large scale language networks from a variety of contexts, including general corpora like the Web, domain-specific corpora like scientific literature and healthcare, and community-specific corpora corresponding to the online social communities.

A Ph.D. student and two master’s students from SI will gain valuable interdisciplinary analytic training while working with Qiaozhu on this project.

Rick Wash , assistant professor in the department of Telecommunications, Information Studies and Media and the School of Journalism at Michigan State University, has been awarded a National Science Foundation grant to explore technical problems in the area of “crowdfunding.”

Crowdfunding sites solicit members of the public to contribute small amounts of money for a particular cause. SI students utilized crowdfunding this year to raise funds for the Alternative Spring Break program on the site Crowdrise.com. Such sites are an example of a commonly studied problem called a “matching marketplace,” where two types of people come together to be matched according to some criteria. Other examples include job search sites and online dating sites.

This project brings together ideas from both computer science and economics. Both disciplines study matching problems, but neither has found a completely satisfactory solution in the presence of complementarities. Wash’s research will develop an understanding of the role of complementarities in both of these types of solutions and apply insights across fields to design better methods of matching.

The project will test these ideas in the real world by developing a crowdfunding system. Crowdfunding is increasingly being applied to fund high-quality professional journalism , and improved crowdfunding systems have the potential to be a new funding source for this struggling industry.

Prolific application developer Hung Truong continues to earn distinction in the semi-annual University of Michigan Mobile Apps Challenge. The spring 2011 winners were just announced, and Hung was runner-up with his new app, Mapskrieg.

Mapskrieg was developed for the iPad, and marries Google maps with Craigslist, allowing users to search for items geographically. See a demo.

Truong works part-time as an application programmer at North Quad. Last fall, he was named first runner-up with his Checkmate for Foursquare app. Enhancing the location-based social networking tool Foursquare, this iPhone app makes the check-in feature automatic when users visit their favorite venues. The app also allows users to share their check-ins on Facebook and Twitter.

While at SI, Truong and two fellow MSI students won the RPM Ventures annual contest that provides support to entrepreneurial start-ups for their company Troubadour Mobile. He continues to develop new applications independently.

The goal of the Mobile Apps competition is to promote entrepreneurial thinking and encourage the U-M community to develop innovative mobile applications.

Faculty members in archives and preservation from institutions in the United States and Canada will come to the School of Information next week to discuss the future of their fields in the digital age.

At the Nexus of Analog and Digital: A Symposium for Preservation Educators is a by-invitation event sponsored by the School of Information with support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. It will run from June 5-7 on campus.

Associate Professor Paul Conway, who is coordinating the symposium, said the purpose of the symposium is exploring how to teach preservation in ways that acknowledge the heritage of analog preservation techniques and perspectives while pointing toward research and development initiatives in the digital sphere. An emphasis on preserving digital information, some of which is derived from and provides direct reference to original analog sources, could well be the future of preservation education. A focus on digital information also parallels attention within the cultural heritage community on the changing nature of preservation activities in an increasingly digital world.

Our plenary talks will feature leading faculty whose scholarship engages preservation issues, Conway said. Each participant will share a brief position paper on one of the themes of the symposium, drawing on the priorities and activities within their respective academic environments.

An outcome of the symposium will be an agenda for advancing research and doctoral-level graduate education that does not require a high level of administrative coordination for implementation. Because faculty are relatively autonomous within their school and departmental “boats,” the symposium may foster a shared sense of the value that might be achieved when faculty tend to “row in the same direction with similar pace and purpose.”

In recognition of African-American History Month, we would like to highlight a few of the many organizations working to create a better future by providing students with higher education opportunities:

The United Negro College Fund “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

The United Negro College Fund administers over 400 scholarship and internship programs at its 39 member colleges. Each year, the UNCF provides financial assistance to over 60,000 college students to help further their education. The organization hosts an annual Evening with the Stars, which is the nation’s largest televised fundraiser for minority education.  The event has raised upwards of $200 million dollars to date. Two of the fund’s key programs are the Gates Millennium Scholars Program and the UNCF-Merck Science Initiative.

The Thurgood Marshall College Fund “Changing the World . . . One Leader at a Time.”

The Thurgood Marshall College Fund has 47 member schools offering more than 1,300 programs in a wide variety of majors. The fund has awarded more than 7,700 scholarships and awards worth over $100 million throughout 22 years of service. The fund is dedicated towards helping students attend the country’s six public historically black law schools. More information about TMCF scholarships can be found on their Scholarship Programs page.

The National Association of Black Accountants “Lifting As We Climb.”

The National Association of Black Accountants is a non-profit association whose aims are to further its members professional and academic achievements. To this end, NABA has provided over $8 million in scholarships to enable students to further their business studies. Through its National Scholarship Program, NABA is able to offer up to 70 scholarships from $1,000-$10,000 annually.

SI Ph.D. candidate Kathleen Fear has been selected to receive the highly competitive A. R. Zipf Fellowship in Information Management for 2011 awarded by the Council on Library and Information Resources. Kathleen holds a bachelors in physics from Yale University and a masters in information, with a specialization in the preservation of information, from the School of Information at the University of Michigan.

Kathleen’s research focuses on how scientific data can best be preserved, managed, and accessed. Recently, she conducted a major study with co-PI and fellow SI PhD candidate Devan Donaldson, exploring the use of provenance metadata in the ProteomeCommons repository, a major data archive for proteomics research. Her study found that proteomics researchers rely on far more information than just the available metadata when finding and evaluating data for reuse: the repository structure itself was an important source of information, particularly the contextualization provided by linking datasets to the papers they were associated with.

Named in honor of A. R. Zipf, a pioneer in information management systems, the $10,000 fellowship is awarded annually to a student who is enrolled in graduate school in the early stages of study and shows exceptional promise for leadership and technical achievement in information management.

While Kathleen is the first SI student to win this competitive fellowship award, she is the second University of Michigan graduate student to have done so. Dean Jeff MacKie-Mason’s student Terence Kelly won the award in 2001 while earning his PhD in computer science. Terence is now a researcher in the Exascale Computing Lab at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, CA.

See more information and the full list of previous fellowship recipients here.