iConference 2011 Home
Seattle Conference a Tremendous Success
Record attendance, myriad social events, and a stunning venue all combined to make iConference 2011 the biggest and most successful event in the six-year history of the conference. Held in Seattle on February 8-11, 2011, and hosted by the University of Washington Information School, the goal of the conference was to showcase research and advancements in areas such as collaboration, e-government, health informatics, human-computer interaction, information security, information management, and library science.
Highlights of the conference included a 90-exhibit poster session, keynote address from Susan Dumais of Microsoft Research (Click here for transcript), two industry panels, a Microsoft visit (to watch video of the morning portion, click here; to see the afternoon portion, click here), and more than 50 other papers and alternative events sessions featuring 325 presenters. Also included were a Doctoral Student Colloquium (supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation) and a Junior Faculty and Postdoc Colloquium.
The iConference is an annual gathering of scholars and practitioners in the information field spanning the public, private and non-profit sectors. The iConference is sponsored by the iSchools organization (which now consists of 31 information schools spanning eight countries worldwide) and is open to any and all information scholars, researchers and professionals who wish to attend. This year’s conference received almost 300 submissions, and was attended by more than 530 participants—both records for the six-year-old conference. This year's proceedings have been archived to the ACM Digital Library.
The conference concluded with an awards banquet recognizing the most outstanding paper and posters presentations (visit our photos page for more). Awards were presented to the following:
Best Papers- “Preferences for Health Information and Decision-making: Development of the Health Information Wants (HIW) questionnaire” by Bo Xie (University of Maryland), Mo Wang (Maryland), Robert Feldman (Maryland)
- “Dusting for Science: Motivation and participation of digital citizen science volunteers” by Oded Nov (NYU-Poly), Ofer Arazy (University of Alberta), David Anderson (University of California, Berkeley)
- “Finding Social Roles in Wikipedia” by Howard T. Welser (Ohio University), Dan Cosley (Cornell University), Gueorgi Kossinets (Cornell), Austin Lin (Cornell; Microsoft), Fedor Dokshin (Cornell), Geri Gay (Cornell), Marc Smith (Connected Action)
- “A Vision for Information Visualization in Information Science” by Marilyn Ostergren (University of Washington), Jeff Hemsley (Washington), Miranda Belarde-Lewis (Washington), Shawn Walker (Washington)
- “Things Fall Apart: Maintenance, repair, and technology for education Initiatives in rural Namibia” by Steven J. Jackson (University of Michigan), Alex Pompe (Michigan), Gabriel Krieshok (Michigan)
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“eBirding: Technology Adoption and the Transformation of Leisure into Science” by Andrea Wiggins (Syracuse University)
- “Annotation evolution: how Web 2.0 technologies are enabling a change in annotation practices” by Simone Sacchi (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
- “Building Values into the Design of Pervasive Mobile Technologies” by Katie Shilton (University of California, Los Angeles)
The iConference is unique in that it is hosted each year by a different iSchools member institution. In addition to showcasing the contributions that iSchools are making to the information field, this year’s Seattle location afforded attendees the opportunity to engage with industry leaders with a strong local presence, such as Presenting Sponsors Microsoft Research, Intelius, and SerialsSolutions, as well as Google, Intel and Survey Analytics.
Plans for future iConferences are already in the works. Next year’s conference will take place in Toronto, February 7-12, and will be hosted by the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. Microsoft Research has already announced its intention of supporting the event as a presenting sponsor. Visit the official iConference 2012 website for more information.
The following year, iConference 2013 will be hosted by the University of North Texas College of Information (Denton, TX). For 2014, the iConference will move to Europe, where it will be hosted by the Berlin School of Library and Information Science at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, in partnership with the School of Information and Library Studies at University College Dublin (Ireland), the Royal School of Library and Information Science (Denmark), and the Information School at the University of Sheffield (England).
