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Two new faculty members join iSchool

The School of Information has hired two new faculty members whose research is already shaping the interdisciplinary field of information studies.

 

Assistant Professor Amelia Acker researches the data that people create when they use mobile phones to send text messages, update their Facebook status, or leverage wireless networks in myriad other ways, such as automatically generating GPS coordinates.

 

“Amelia is emerging as one of the brightest young scholars in digital records and data traces, helping us better understand the transmission of information through time and media,” iSchool Dean and Professor Andrew Dillon said. “She will significantly advance our traditional strengths in archives and records management while enabling new teaching and research opportunities at the intersection of people and technology.”

 

Assistant Professor Danna Gurari's research interests span computer vision, crowdsourcing, applied machine learning and biomedical image analysis.

 

“Extracting information from images is an increasingly important challenge in our digital world, and Danna brings a unique mix of computational and crowdsourcing approaches to this problem,” Dillon said. “Her research is already recognized in the biomedical field for its importance, and she will complement our strengths in information discovery and retrieval.”

 

Gurari’s research has been recognized by the 2015 Researcher Excellence Award from the Boston University computer science department, among other accolades. Prior to joining the iSchool, she was a postdoctoral fellow in UT Austin’s computer science department. Gurari also worked five years in industry, developing software for satellite systems and building custom, high performance, multi-camera image analysis systems for military, industrial and academic applications.

 

“As an interdisciplinary researcher, I am delighted to join such a richly diverse and intelligent group of professors at the Information School,” she said. “I am excited to join the faculty and work with students on designing systems that accelerate the extraction of information from images and videos.”

 

Gurari will begin teaching in the Spring 2017 semester.

 

Acker, who began teaching in Fall 2016, said people’s constant connection to wireless networks is creating vast amounts of data that is transforming culture while raising questions about important issues from government surveillance to the way we read and write on screens. The recipient of a grant from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services, Acker’s current research also addresses data literacy and digital preservation to support long-term cultural memory, as well as the environmental impact of preserving huge quantities of data.

 

“There’s a future where all of us will be creating data and metadata, whether we’re intentionally thinking about it or not, just by virtue of carrying a phone,” said Acker, whose award-winning dissertation was a history of the text message as a seminal development in modern, networked culture. “Every time there’s a big jump in technology that allows us to create new information, whether cuneiform tablets or Xerox machines, there’s a huge new change in the ways we remember and understand ourselves as a society. That’s what I’m really interested in right now.”

 

Acker joins the School of Information from the University of Pittsburgh’s iSchool, where she was lead faculty of the archives program. From 2006-2014 she worked as an archivist, librarian and preservation consultant for libraries and archives in Southern California.

 

At UT Austin, the iSchool’s commitment to publishing and authorship and its broad curriculum were among factors that drew Acker to Texas, she said, as well as the strength of the school’s archives and conservation programs.

 

“Historically, the imperative to preserve is something that libraries and museums have been in control of,” Acker said. “As we move toward platforms like Dropbox, Gmail and Instagram, places where we’re constantly creating cultural memory together, how do we think of these new kinds of social media platforms as archives, and how do we make the case or lobby or describe them as such?”

 

Despite the fact that we are creating more information and more data than ever before, people are also engaging with platforms and products that don’t have long-term storage provisions, Acker said. “There are all sorts of weird things we haven’t really grappled with yet,” she said. “It’s a very exciting time.”

Aug. 29, 2016