Participants
Adam Kriesberg is a Lecturer at the University of Maryland, College of Information Studies. He currently works on a variety of research projects related to agricultural data curation as part of a cooperative agreement with the National Agricultural Library. Adam completed his PhD at the University of Michigan in 2015. His additional work has covered public-private partnerships, digital preservation, cultural heritage and metrics/evaluation of information services.
Andrea Wiggins is an assistant professor of Information Systems & Quantitative Analysis in the College of Information Science & Technology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. She examines how design, management, and technologies support the interests of diverse stakeholders in citizen science. Her current work focuses on understanding the growing role and impacts of technologies in citizen science, and evaluating individual and collective performance and productivity.
Andrew Schrock received his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California, and currently is a post-doctoral fellow at Chapman University. His research broadly considers how people use communication technologies to re-imagine and re-configure family, community, and government. He has written a book on the “civic tech” movement, and articles in journals including New Media & Society; the International Journal of Communication; and Big Data & Society. For more information and articles please visit his website at aschrock.com.
Aniruddha Gokhale is a full Professor of Computer Science and Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Senior Research Scientist in the Institute for Software Integrated Systems both at Vanderbilt University. His current research focuses on addressing a variety of systems challenges in cloud-fog-edge computing. He has been funded by the NSF US Ignite program to investigate the use of cloud computing technologies to support collaborative STEM education.
Beth St. Jean is an Assistant Professor in the College of Information Studies (https://ischool.umd.edu/), the Assistant Director of the Information Policy and Access Center (iPAC) (http://ipac.umd.edu/), and an affiliate faculty member of the Horowitz Center for Health Literacy (http://sph.umd.edu/center/hchl), all at the University of Maryland, College Park, USA (https://www.umd.edu/). She holds an MLS and a PhD in Information from the University of Michigan School of Information (https://www.si.umich.edu/). Beth’s research aims to improve people’s long-term health outlooks and reduce health disparities by exploring important interrelationships between people’s health-related information behaviors, health literacy levels, health-related self-efficacy, and their health behaviors.
Bob Gradeck manages the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center at the University of Pittsburgh’s University Center for Social and Urban Research. The Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center provides a shared technological and legal infrastructure to support research, analysis, decision making, and community engagement. It was created in 2015 and is managed by the University of Pittsburgh Center for Urban and Social Research, in partnership with Allegheny County and the City of Pittsburgh.
Dr. Brian Butler is Professor and Senior Associate Dean at the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies. Before joining the University of Maryland, Dr. Butler was a faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh’s Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business and the Clinical and Translational Science Institute. Dr. Butler’s research has been published in leading journals such as Journal of Association of Information Science and Technology (JASIST), Organization Science, Information Systems Research (ISR), MIS Quarterly (MISQ), Communications of the Association of Information Systems, Journal of Management Information Systems (JMIS), and Communications of the ACM. Dr. Butler is also the coauthor of several books on political rhetoric and writing and numerous peer reviewed conference papers.
Chauncey Robbs is a data-driven professional and who works at the intersection of technology and urban planning at The Department of Parks and Recreation in Prince George’s County, MD. Chauncey has professional interests in the various applications of location-based data. He is particularly interested in the nexus of location based services and government service delivery. Chauncey holds a BA in Economics, and graduate degrees in City and Regional Planning and Business Administration.
Chiyoung Oh is a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland, College Park’s College of Information Studies. His areas of research span information behavior, human-computer interaction, health informatics, and community informatics, and his dissertation research examines international newcomer students’ information behaviors during adjustment to a host country. Chiyoung holds an MS in Information Science (with a concentration in Human-Computer Interaction) from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as a BA in Psychology, a BA in Library and Information Science, and a BBA in Business Administration from Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea.
Diane Travis is the Research Coordinator for the College of Information Studies, University of Maryland as well as the Special Assistant to the Senior Associate Dean. She earned her Masters of Library Science from the College of Information Studies, with her thesis looking at the information flow between different levels of first responders during Hurricane Katrina. She has a Bachelor’s of Arts from Hampshire College with a concentration in Neuropsychology.
Elizabeth Bowie Christoforetti is design director and co-founder of Supernormal, a practice that bridges the disciplines of architecture, urban design, and planning with the goal of bringing increased sensitivity and systematization to design practice using improved quantitative methods. The multi-disciplinary team pursues the use of emerging technologies to better align human experience with urban design and development. Elizabeth lives in Cambridge, MA, where she has conducted related research at the MIT Media Lab and teaches at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Dr. Erik Johnston is an Associate Professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society, the Director of the Center for Smart Cities and Regions, and the Director of Policy Informatics at the Decision Theater. His research has been grounded with practical application in health care delivery, patient-led research, participatory platforms with a public intent, the governance of large-scale natural resource conservation efforts, the future of Arizona’s educational systems, extreme heat mitigation, and the development of the 35-year Phoenix Transportation plan. In each context, he emphasized the use of participatory methods to reduce the gap between knowledge discovery and use. Among others, the research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Jack Carroll is a Distinguished Professor of Information Sciences and Technology at Pennsylvania State University. His research is in human-computer interaction, including tools and methods to enhance design, education and learning, collaboration, and community. In 2018, he received the Faculty Scholar Medal in Social and Behavioral Science from Penn State.
John Harlow is a postdoctoral scholar in the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Opening Governance at the Arizona State University School for the Future of Innovation in Society. He researches strategic intervention points for process innovation in governance. John is currently working on the RWJF grant “Opening pathways for discovery, research, and innovation in health and healthcare.
Jonathan Brier is a 3rd year PhD student in the College of Information Studies program. He earned his B.S in Media and Information Technology (Telecom) at Michigan State University and M.S. in Information focused in Social Computing at the University of Michigan. His current studies focus is on the health and sustainability of communities and technology primarily explored through applications in the domain of citizen science and network based applications.
Kris Unsworth is an information scientist with a focus on information policy and ethical use of data in relation to civil society and government. Her research is multidisciplinary using theoretical aspects of science, technology, and society studies; analytical philosophy; qualitative and quantitative evaluation methods.
Lauren Withycombe Keeler is a futurist and sustainability scientist in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University. In her research and futures practice professor Keeler collaborates with scientists, engineers, universities, governments and communities. She studies, develops, and applies scenarios, multi-method approaches, and novel games to explore alternative futures and develop strategies and actions to bring better futures into being.
Libby Hemphill, PhD, is an associate professor of information at the University of Michigan and the Director of the Resource Center for Minority Data at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. Her recent work focuses on how users leverage Twitter and Facebook to influence public policy and how television fans use social media to lobby for their interests. She is especially interested in how people marshal information and communication technologies in service of social change and in the ethics and pragmatics of research using big social data.
Dr. Margaret M. Hinrichs is a researcher in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University. She studies organizations as constituted through members’ interpersonal communication processes. She is also a program manager at ASU’s Decision Theater, where she facilitates the creation and use of models as boundary objects to engage diverse stakeholders in collaborative decision making.
Mary Kendig is a Research Administrator at the College of Information Studies. She is active in the Ethics & Values in Design (EViD) Lab. She is currently assisting Dr. Katie Shilton in managing multiple grants, including a $3 million NSF grant exploring the re-use of online public data. She is also serving as the Conference Coordinator for the upcoming iConference in 2019, which will be held at the University of Maryland.
Myeong is a Ph.D. candidate studying information science at the University of Maryland at College Park. He is a Junior Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of Communities and Information (CASCI); also, he is a Data Science & Technology Fellow at The Center for Open Data Enterprise, a non-profit that advocates for open data movements. His research interests are in understanding the dynamics of cities, local groups, and local information inequality by making use of computational methods and social theories. He also designs and implements systems that demonstrate and solve information issues.
Nick Barendt is the Executive Director of the Institute for Smart, Secure and Connected Systems (ISSACS) at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) and Co-Director of the IoT Collaborative, in Cleveland, Ohio. He is an engineer with extensive experience building IoT and Connected Device Systems, across a variety of industries. He is also an adjunct faculty member in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at CWRU.
Nora is a PhD student at Drexel College of Computing and Informatics. Her research currently focuses on how underrepresented communities adapt to new technologies. She is particularly interested in community-centered approaches to research.
As Deputy Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC) Dr. Mann is representing UTC in the Chattanooga Smart Community Collaborative (CSCC). The purpose of the CSCC is to research, develop, deploy and evaluate technology and analytically based solutions to the problems facing the systems and infrastructure that serve the quality of life and economy in the Chattanooga area.
Ricardo L. Punzalan is assistant professor of archives and digital curation at the College of Information Studies, affiliate assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology, and co-director of Museum Scholarship and Material Culture program at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is also the current Chair of the Native American Archives Section of the Society of American Archivists. In 2016, he received an early-career grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to study and develop strategies to assess the impact of access to digitized ethnographic archives for academic and Indigenous community users. He also examines ‘virtual reunification’ as a strategy to provide integrated access to dispersed ethnographic archival images online. He holds a Ph.D. in Information as well as graduate certificates in Science, Technology, and Society (STS) and Museum Studies from the University of Michigan.
Robin Brewer is a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Information at University of Michigan. In her work, she asks how online and offline experiences with technology can be made more accessible to marginalized and underrepresented populations. Dr. Brewer designs, builds, and studies systems to better engage older adults and people with vision impairments, two groups for which technology access and use can be challenging.
Roslyn Johnson is the Deputy Director of Facility Operations for a six-time National Gold Medal winning agency of The Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission’s Department of Parks and Recreation in Prince George’s County, MD which is both CAPRA and CALEA certified. In this role, she leads innovative recreation programs that serve the community and has oversight of natural and historic resources, sports and arts programs and facilities, maintenance and development, and public affairs and marketing. Her background and experience include overseeing multi-million-dollar budgets, leading a diverse workforce, managing programs and facilities, and representing the agency in outreach with elected officials, residents, and communities; this was recognized in 2017 when Roslyn was inducted into the prestigious American Academy for Park & Recreation Administration, an organization with less than 200 members nationwide.
Sean is an open source software researcher and a founding member of the Linux Foundation’s working group on community health analytics for open source software CHAOSS, co-lead of the CHAOSS metrics software working group and leader of the open source metrics tool AUGUR which can be forked and cloned and experimented wtih on GitHub. Sean is also the founder of the Data Science and Analytics Masters program at Missouri, which he’s now passed on to people interested in being managers and building empires. Sean’s publications focus on understanding how social technologies influence organizational, small group and community dynamics, typically including analysis of electronic trace data from systems combined with the perspectives of people whose behavior is traced.
Sheena Erete is an assistant professor in the College of Computing and Digital Media at DePaul University, where she researches the role of technology and design in addressing social issues such as violence, civic engagement, and STEM education in resource constrained communities in Chicago. She earned a Ph.D. in Technology and Social Behavior (a joint degree in Computer Science and Communication) from Northwestern University and a Masters of Computer Science from Georgia Tech. As an undergraduate, she attended Spelman College, where she studied Mathematics and Computer Science.
Sheri Parks, PhD is Vice President for Strategic Initiatives at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. Formerly, she was the College of Arts and Humanities Associate Dean for Research, Interdisciplinary Scholarship, and Programming, Director of the Arts and Humanities Center for Synergy, and an associate professor of American Studies, all at UMD. She was the project director for Baltimore Stories; Narrative and the Life of an American City, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. A companion volume to Baltimore Stories will be published by Johns Hopkins Press in the fall of 2018. Sheri has continued to participate as the community liaison with two UMD grant projects–the National Center for Smart Growth’s NSF planning grant project in West Baltimore and the US Department of Commerce-funded MAVRIC workforce development project. Sheri continues to lead the Baltimore Thinkathon with partner the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance, now in its sixth year.
Shipi Dhanorkar is a third year doctoral student in Informatics at Pennsylvania State University. Her research is at the nexus of user-centered design, technology and community engagement. She is interested in understanding how people engage with and leverage technology to bring about social change. She is currently working on projects related to community water data, online petitioning tools and e-governance.
Ms. Shonte Eldridge currently serves as the City of Baltimore’s Deputy Chief of Operations where she is responsible for supporting Mayor Catherine E. Pugh’s efforts to strategically align and transform City government and leading city wide initiatives, strategies and smart cities projects that directly impact residents, visitors and business owners
Srishti Gupta is a second year PhD student in College of Information Science and Technology, at Pennsylvania State University. She is working in the area of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) with Prof. John M. Carroll. She holds a masters degree in Software Engineering.
Susan J. Winter, Ph.D. is the Associate Dean for Research at the University of Maryland’s School of Information Studies. She has previously been a Science Advisor in the Directorate for Social Behavioral and Economic Sciences, Acting Deputy Director of the Office of Cyberinfrastructure at the National Science Foundation and a Program Director supporting distributed, interdisciplinary scientific collaboration where she was responsible for programs funding research on virtual organizations as sociotechnical systems, cyber-enabled discovery and innovation, and cyberinfrastructure education, and enabling resources for building community and capacity for complex data-driven and computational science including high performance computers, large-scale databases, and advanced software tools.
Tawanna is an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information and holds a courtesy appointment with the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department. Tawanna earned her Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) from Carnegie Mellon University. She now leads the Social Innovations research group, an interdisciplinary group of individuals whose vision is to design, build, and enhance technologies to solve real-world problems affecting marginalized groups and individuals primarily in the U.S. Her current projects aim to address unemployment, environmental sustainability, and technical literacy by fostering social and sociotechnical capital within these communities.
Youngjin Yoo is the Elizabeth M. and William C. Treuhaft Professor in Entrepreneurship and Professor of Information Systems at the department of Design & Innovation at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University. He is also WBS Distinguished Research Environment Professor at Warwick Business School, UK. and a Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics, UK.
Yunyun is an undergrad at Cornell University studying biological engineering and government. She is currently a smart gigabit community (SGC) intern at US Ignite, a non-profit employing advanced networking technologies to build the foundation for smart communities, which helped develop her interests in urban development and data equity. Yunyun hopes to continue utilizing her love for scientific innovation to create positive societal impacts