ISR Shines at iConference 2015

ISR made a great showing at iConference 2015, held March 24-27 in Newport Beach, CA. iConference is an international gathering of scholars and researchers concerned with critical information issues in contemporary society. It is presented by the iSchools organization, a collection of Information Schools. The UCI Donald Bren School of ICS is a member of the iSchools, and hosted the 2015 conference. Informatics Dept. Prof. Gary Olson led the way as conference General Chair. With over 530 attendees, 2015 was a great success! 

Prof. Olson enlisted ISR’s support, with ISR Assistant Director Debra A. Brodbeck serving as Conference Manager. ISR has a long history of supporting conferences, including ICSE 2011, SPLASH 2011, FSE 2008, ASE 2005, and FSE 2004.

iConference 2015 was special for ISR, as so many people participated. Notably, but not exhaustively:

• The Doctoral Dissertation Award is bestowed upon the author of the dissertation judged the best completed during the preceding academic year at any iSchool. The 2015 winner is alumnae Xinru Page, for her dissertation “Factors that Influence Adoption and Use of Location-Sharing Social Media Archives.” Her advisor was Prof. Alfred Kobsa. 
• Ph.D. student Martin Shelton’s paper, “Online Media Forums as Separate Social Lives: A Qualitative Study of Disclosure Within and Beyond Reddit,” co-authored by Ph.D. student Katherine Lo and Prof. Bonnie Nardi, was nominated for the Best Paper Award.  
• The Social Media Expo winning team was from UCI, with two of the seven student team members from ISR. Their presentation was titled “Racial Violence Archive: Public Information System on Incidents of Violence during the Civil Rights Period.”  The ISR team members were graduate students Hosub Lee and Fernando Spanghero. The faculty sponsors were Prof. Alfred Kobsa and UCI Prof. Geoff Ward, Social Ecology.
• Seven ISR graduate students served as student volunteers: Nicole Crenshaw, Caitlin Lustig, Ankita Raturi, Martin Shelton, Michael (Six) Silberman, Dakuo Wang, and Yiran Wang.
• The organizers of the workshop on “ICT for Sustainability” included Prof. Birgit Penzenstadler - who was previously a research associate at ISR, Prof. Debra Richardson and Ph.D. students Michael (Six) Silberman and Ankita Raturi.

Additionally, Prof. Bonnie Nardi is serving as Papers Co-Chair for iConference 2016, to be held in Philadelphia, PA.

More info on both the 2015 and 2016 iConference is available at: http://ischools.org/the-iconference/