News from the iSchools
College of Computing News: Get Smart: College Shopping Advice From a Pro
Rich DeMillo (Computer Science) says prospective students and their parents need to go beyond the organized campus tour when shopping for colleges: Talk to students and teachers, don't be fooled by fancy dorms or high-profile sports teams, and even check out schools' financial health before laying down that deposit. Source: Forbes.com
College of Computing News: Why We Should Teach More Computer Science Classes
"The real power of computer science is a new kind of literacy," says Mark Guzdial (Interactive Computing). "When we learn to program, we gain yet another way to understand the world and talk about it." Guzdial's Georgia Computes! program has been teaching that literacy to Georgia K-12 teachers and students for five years. Source: NBC News
College of Computing News: How to Paint an Ant in the Name of Science
A project directed by James Rehg (Interactive Computing) on automating insect behavior calls for tagging individual members of an ant colony. Ph.D. student Andy Quitmeyer put together an entertaining video on how best to accomplish this delicate task. Source: io9.com
UNC shares a $2.18 million grant from the National Science Foundation for digital repository
The repository, called Dryad, is designed to archive data that underlie published findings in evolutionary biology, ecology and related fields and allow scientists to access and build on each other’s findings.
For more information, contact
Wanda Monroe, (919) 843-8337
Twitter-Based Personal Graphing Tool Wins Carnegie Mellon’s 2009 Smiley Award
Grafitter, a technology that makes it easy to collect information about yourself over time and depict it in graph form on Twitter, is the 2009 winner of Carnegie Mellon University's second annual Smiley Award. The award, sponsored by Yahoo! Inc., recognizes innovation in technology-assisted person-to-person communication and is open to all undergraduate and graduate students at the university.
More on "Twitter-Based Personal Graphing Tool Wins Carnegie Mellon’s 2009 Smiley Award"
For more information, contact
Sumitha Rao, (412) 268-3097
Pitt’s iSchool to Launch Graduate Research Program in Cyberscholarship
The University of Pittsburgh School of Information Sciences has received a five-year, $782,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the development of a graduate research program designed to understand and influence the emergence of digital communication and research in academia, known as cyberscholarship.