Several faculty members, PhD students, and a postdoctoral researcher will be representing The University of Texas at Austin School of Information at the 2020 ASIS&T Annual Meeting, which is being held virtually this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, from October 22nd to November 1st. The theme of the conference is Information for a Sustainable World: Addressing Society’s Grand Challenges.
Associate Dean for Education Soo Young Rieh will be speaking in a panel, Toward an Integrated Information Science, with colleagues from five other universities. Professor Loriene Roy is a panelist along with three colleagues from other universities who will be discussing how Racism Isn’t Just an American Problem: International EDI Issues in Information Science. Assistant Professor Amelia Acker will be giving one of the keynote lectures at the Conceptual Models in Sociotechnical Systems workshop as well as participate in a panel discussion, Integrating Research and Teaching for Data Curation in iSchools, with colleagues from four other universities. Acker also single-authored a long paper: Emulation Encounters: Software Preservation in Libraries, Archives, and Museums.
Other iSchoolers will also lead discussions of research papers and posters. Associate Professor Philip Doty single-authored a long paper: Oxymorons of Privacy and Surveillance in “Smart Homes”. Assistant Professor Elliott Hauser single-authored a paper, How Do We Make Certain? Certainty as a Phenomenon Within Information Behavior, and PhD student Nitin Verma single-authored Deepfakes and Disinformation: A Grand Challenge for Information Behavior Research, both of which will be presented at the SIG-USE workshop. PhD student Nathan W. Davis, Professor Bo Xie, and Assistant Professor Danna Gurari co-authored the long paper, Quality of Images Showing Medication Packaging from Individuals with Vision Impairments: Implications for the Design of Visual Question Answering Applications, which also received this year's ASIS&T SIG-USE Innovation Award. PhD student Yung-Sheng Chang and Associate Professors Jacek Gwizdka and Yan Zhang co-authored a short paper: eHealth Literacy, Information Sources, and Health Webpage Reading Patterns. PhD student Siqi Yi, postdoctoral researcher Stephen Slota, Assistant Professor Jakki Bailey, and Professor Ken Fleischmann, along with S. Craig Watkins from the Moody College of Communication, are presenting a poster entitled “Understanding How African-American and Latinx Youth Evaluate Their Experiences with Digital Assistants”.