November 2010

Rutgers Communication & Information Scholars Garner Grants to study issues of language, information, communication, social media, and knowledge management.

Rutgers faculty members will be working with the telecommunications firm Telcordia, and with other researchers to solve the problems posed by the explosion in the number of data sources that exist around the world.  Including all the data bases maintained by governments and businesses, there are millions of such collections. Much of it is not accessible over the World Wide Web. Professor Paul Kantor in the Department of Library and Information Science, and Professors Tina Eliassi-Rad and Alexander Borgida, both of the Division of Computer Science will work on the “alignment” project with researchers at Telcordia. The $1.6 million grant is sponsored by the Air Force Research Laboratory.

Professor Mor Naaman, with co-PI and SC&I postdoctoral fellow Nicholas Diakopoulos, have been awarded a National Science Foundation grant from the Division of 
Information & Intelligent Systems for a collaborative project with Prof. Luis Gravano of Columbia University. The funded project will tackle the challenges of detection 
and presentation event content from social media sources. The award of $500,000, with $250,000 to support the Rutgers effort, will support a PhD student at Rutgers 
over its three years duration.
Professors Claire McInerney and Stewart Mohr are part of a team of researchers including Dr. Lynn Clemow of Columbia University (PI), Dr. Elizabeth Clarke, Dr. Alfred Tallia, Dr. Ben Crabtree 
and Pam Ohman-Strickland of the University of Medicine and Dentistry New Jersey and Dr. John Orzano, NH Dartmouth Family Medicine Residency who were awarded a 
two-year $468,000 grant from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive  and Kidney Diseases (NIH-NIDDK) to study how use of knowledge management and communication 
processes can improve health care in chronic disease management. The grant will provide a Research Assistantship for a PhD student in Rutgers School of Communication and 
Information.

Professors Nina Wacholder, Smaranda Muresan and Mark Aakhus have been awarded a grant from Rutgers University’s Office of Research for $122,000 to establish an inter-disciplinary laboratory for the Study of Applied Language Technologies and Society (SALTS). The goal of this laboratory is to establish a distinctive research and educational program at Rutgers to study next-generation natural language processing technology that supports communication across cultural and social boundaries. Professor Wacholder is a computational linguist who studies systems that help people access information stored as human language. Professor Muresan is a computational linguist whose research unifies two central themes in human language technologies: computational formalisms to express language phenomena and induction of knowledge from data.
Professor Aakhus is a communication scholar who investigates how technological and organizational design affords and constrains human interaction and reasoning in solving complex problems.

Prof. Chirag Shah has been awarded an OCLC/ALISE Library and Information Science Research Grant for 2011 in the amount of $14,408 for his project, "Modalities, Motivations, and Materials – Investigating Traditional and Social Online Q&A Services.” OCLC is a not for profit computer service and research organization whose systems help libraries locate, acquire, catalog, and lend library materials. ALISE is the Association for Library and Information Science Education.

-- 
Claire R. McInerney
Associate Professor, Department Chair
Library and Information Science Dept.
School of Communication and Information
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
4 Huntington St., #330
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
USA
V +1 732-932-7500 xt. 8218
F +1 732-932-6916
clairemc "at" rutgers.edu