Summary of iSchool Deans meeting with Microsoft Research

September 22, 2011

 

Lee Dirks organized a meeting of the iSchool deans at the Microsoft Faculty Summit this summer. You may recall that I solicited ideas from SIS faculty regarding areas of potential common interest with MSR.  Here is Lee’s report of that meeting. 

It was a pleasure to host all of you at the Microsoft Faculty Summit in Redmond, WA on July 18-20th, but it was a distinct honor to have you participate in the iSchool Forum on the afternoon of the 20th.  Indeed, Tony Hey, Alex Wade, Jonathan Grudin, Susan Dumais and our other colleagues in attendance found this to be a very valuable half-day and I hope we can make this sort of venue a more regular occurrence.

My apologies for the delay in getting my notes out to you following this event.   I’ll spare you all the details, but the rest of summer got away from me (in a good way actually!), but I find myself weeks late in getting you these notes and action items.   

As you will recall, the fundamental aim of the meeting was to identify and hone in on possible areas of joint interest between the MSR Connections team and the iCaucus/iSchool agenda.  Below, I share with you a preliminary version of the ranked priorities I’d like to put forward following our July meeting and upon further reflection after reviewing the meeting minutes.   

  1. iConference Sponsorship.  Microsoft has been a lead/primary sponsor of the iConf for 4 out of the last 5 years, I believe – and we’d like to continue this status.  In addition to this sponsorship, we would like to investigate related activities like a “Design Expo” or a Hackfest competition that happens before and/or at the iConf.  (Of course, our researchers will always submit papers and workshops for consideration as well.)  Possible competition ideas could include: new datasets for Chronozoom; RINs for http://www.digitalnarratives.net; applications leveraging the Academic Search API, etc.
  2. Ongoing attendance/participation in the MSR Faculty Summit.  We would like to continue extending invitations to the iSchool deans, and perhaps even additional invitations for assignment/rotation by the deans to another member of their school (assistant dean, faculty, doctoral student, etc.).  We’ll need to explore/discuss this further, as I only have a limited number invites each year – so we’ll need to be judicious with them for maximum effectiveness. [Note: The flip-side of this would be to ALSO have some kind of MSR event / session at every iConference.]
  3. Promoting availability of (Undergrad, Masters and PhD) internships at Microsoft Research.  This is “low-hanging fruit” and should simply be a matter of connecting the dots between the appropriate people at MSR and the right contact(s) at the iSchools to ensure that this is communicated to students in a timely manner well before key deadlines.
  4. Partnerships with iCaucus schools to encouraging data science / data curation.   We’ve has some preliminary discussions with Syracuse around this, but we’d very much like to pursue this agenda across the schools.  Is this something we could perhaps do jointly with NSF?  With the Sloan Foundation?
  5. Research projects.  We of course want to keep the channels of communication open to ensure there is a strong dialogue between iSchool faculty (and students) and MSR Researchers so that we can pursue research projects of common interest. There is no formal application or proposal process, so the iSchools should continue to reach out to Lee Dirks, Jonathan Grudin and other contacts to discuss/explore potential ideas. [Some of the topics references during the meeting included: Hathi Trust; Europeana; Web Science with KAIST; metadata (i.e., Chronozoom curation); explore a social media-based peer review model; “Living Analytics” with CMU (+ Sue Dumais referenced the “Living Laboratory”); Mechanical Turk related work (at Michigan); Digital preservation (at Berlin/Humboldt) for born-analog audio content; consumer health informatics; MCRC and Ngram Work (Sue Dumais); and Gameification (at UNT)]
  6. Microsoft Sponsorship of Dissertations, Scholarships and/or (Summer) Fellowships.  Something in this space would rate higher for us than a dissertation award, since (we perceive) it would be easier to sponsor more targeted/specific research in data science / data curation (or other areas of more specific interest to Microsoft Research). We’d perhaps even like to see how we can link/associate this with a diversity and gender agenda – ensuring that we have diverse students able to study important, cutting-edge topics at the iSchool of their choice. (Ron Larsen briefed me about a diversity initiative at Pitt that has potential/future implications for all of the iSchools?)
    • Data Science curriculum (Liz @ Syracuse): Curriculum sharing; encourage cross-school cooperation; fund programs (discretionary fund for deans)
    • Foster industry + iSchool relationship (Hal @ Irvine): Pipeline for special projects, career development and recruiting
  7. Partnerships with iCaucus schools to investigate interesting and appropriate ways to incorporate Microsoft Research technologies into iSchool curriculum.  Ranking this lower, as we don’t have specific ideas here, but would like to continue to explore ways to engage with faculty who might be interested to include Microsoft Research tools into their teaching.  Possible ideas would be to produce “curriculum supplements” to help faculty teach specific concepts or bits of software, or perhaps even having MSR researchers to guest lectures, etc.
  8. Microsoft Sponsorship of an Annual Dissertation Award.  Frankly, this comes in as a lower priority for MSR.  While this might be a high-profile activity in terms of raising awareness with faculty and doctoral students, our concern is that it does not actively produce/result in broad understanding of our goals and intentions.   If we are seeking awareness with the larger iSchool community, we assume iConference sponsorship is a more effective channel.

I am eager to hear your thoughts and feedback on these priorities – and your ideas for how to further operationalize them.  We in MSR feel strongly that in working together with the iSchool community that we can achieve great things!

 

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