University of Cincinnati, School of Information Technology Application Deadline: October 31, 2023 SoIT seeks to hire three tenure-track Assistant Professors to start in August 2024, advancing research in the practical, applied, and technical dimensions of securing systems and information, championing technological innovation, and engaging in new evidence-based approaches in IT industry with interdisciplinary collaborations. Link to Job Ad: https://jobs.uc.edu/job/Cincinnati-Asst-Professor%2C-School-of-Information-Technology%2C-Educ-Criminal-Justice-&-Human-Srvcs-OH-45201/1065950200/

University of Michigan, School of Information Application Deadline: October 15, 2023 The University of Michigan, School of Information seeks qualified tenure-track faculty candidates (open rank) to broaden existing scholarship within the school and the U-M community in the area of racial justice in computing, technology, and policy, with a particular emphasis on the domains of data and AI. Areas of research and teaching may include, but are not limited to: critical data studies, critical algorithm studies, algorithmic inequality, science and technology studies, intersectional analysis of digital labor and precarity, racial capitalism and platform studies, the economics of race and racism, social implications of data-driven systems, technology policy, and the ethics and politics of computing. We especially welcome scholars who engage with the intersections of racial justice, data, digital technology and critical race/ethnic studies, Black studies, intersectional feminisms, decolonization and postcolonial studies, transregional and global studies, disability studies, Indigenous studies, and trans studies.

Carnegie Mellon University, Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy By Bill Brink Heinz College has plenty of expertise in the prevention of cyber attacks, including phishing, the practice of sending fraudulent emails to obtain sensitive information. Fishing, with an F? Not so much. Until now. In 2022, a group of Heinz College students built a prototype of a data pipeline to help the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) combat illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing. The students – Sebastian Dodt, Bikash Gupta, Yingzhe Jin, Eunyoung Lee, Ziyou Li, Liam McLane and Marc Weinheimer – built this pipeline for their Capstone project, during which students partner with real-world clients to help them solve a problem. “We are told that it has had an impact, that it radically changed the way the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency looks at illegal fishing,” Dodt said. “That’s something that’s super satisfying. My whole career, I’ve been striving to have an impact on the world. It’s the whole reason that I’m here.” It Started with a Memo The NGA’s portfolio includes a broad array of responsibilities. For most of its 26-year history, none of them involved fish. The agency typically supplies intelligence to the military (it played a key role in the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound), assists in the wake of natural disasters, and supports security efforts for large-scale events like the Olympics or the Super Bowl. But it also assists with counternarcotics, and after the White House released a memo in June of 2022 directing federal agencies to address the issue of IUU fishing, the NGA asked for a bit of help. The team created a prioritization matrix for enforcement of IUU fishing. Policing IUU fishing is a tricky issue, and technology can help to a point. In 2015, Google partnered with the ocean conservation organization Oceana and the satellite technology firm SkyTruth to create Global Fishing Watch, an open-source, real-time suite of map and data analysis tools to track international fishing activity. But even if you can find the bad actors, reeling them in is another matter. “One of the things that I encouraged everybody to think about is to not frame it entirely as cops and robbers, how do we catch people,” said Jonathan Caulkins, the H. Guyford Stever University Professor of Operations Research and Public Policy at Heinz College and the project’s advisor. “And that’s in part from my experience with analyzing other illegal markets. The problem with market-type crime is the tendency for easily replaceable assets to get replaced, even if they are incapacitated in some fashion. So you have to think about an economic model of the market and figure out what assets can be disabled that are harder to replace.” Refining the Search Every fishing boat must be registered, or “flagged,” to a specific nation. Some nations, known as flag-of-convenience states, sell these registrations for profit and have little interest in policing IUU fishing. For other countries, their small navies and coast guards make it impossible to patrol their exclusive economic zone (EEZ), which extends 200 nautical miles from the edge of their territorial waters. An inconsistent patchwork of treaties and agreements governs – and sometimes fails to govern – enforcement in international waters. “The problem is really complicated because you’re taking an illegal activity problem and then you’re dropping it thousands of miles in the middle of the ocean,” McLane said. “And on top of that, you’re giving every country in the world at least partial jurisdiction over a piece of this. And obviously, fish don’t respect national boundaries.” Attempting to enforce IUU fishing by targeting the world’s estimated 2.4 million powered fishing vessels is lunacy, but there are bigger fish to fry. “These fishing boats don't go back to ports every time that they fish,” Dodt said. “Instead, they meet ‘reefer’ vessels, these bigger support vessels, who give them fuel and take their fish and freeze it and package it. And then they go back out and steal fish again, and they can do that for years and never have to go to port.” While the fishing boats frequently deactivate their automatic identification system (AIS) transponders, the support vessels must keep theirs on. That, combined with the fact that there are only 1,500 or so reefers at sea at a given time, makes them desirable targets. By mixing legitimate and illegal catch, the support vessels can launder the illicit fish on the world market. One morning, a few hours before a meeting with his group, Dodt had an idea. He remembered reading about an incident in which a U.S. Coast Guard cutter attempted to intercept a fleet of Chinese fishing boats near the Galapagos Islands, scouring the waters off the coast of Ecuador in search of Humboldt squid. Some boats fled. One of them tried to ram the cutter. “That's Right up Their Alley” Among the boats that fled was the Yong Hang 3, a 472-foot-long reefer vessel considered one of the worst offenders in the IUU world. She’s flagged to Panama, but she’s essentially Chinese. These supply ships sometimes meet fishing boats with an active transponder in what is known as a tracked meeting. The meetings Dodt and his team were concerned about were “dark” meetings, when the reefer vessel remained stationary for hours, seemingly alone but almost certainly engaging in transshipment and resupply with a fishing boat. When those meetings take place in international waters just outside an EEZ, they’re a proxy for illegal activity. Dodt ran a quick analysis to see which fishing boats had met with the Yong Hang 3, and which other reefer vessels they met. Networks and patterns emerged. “The [NGA] advisor and two people on our team who have worked with the military before, they were like, ‘Wow, they will love this,’” Dodt said. “The military is all about networks. That's right up their alley. And I think that's one of the biggest things we contributed, was this network analysis.” Global Fishing Watch data has a 72-hour lag time, which makes real-time enforcement difficult. But SeaVision, a tool built for the Department of Transportation to track and sort thousands of ships around the world, contains information updated within the hour. Combining all this data, the team built the NGA a platform that at a glance shows a ship’s dark meetings, network, location, heading, and, most importantly in terms of enforcement, flag, EEZ status and proximity to U.S. waters. Finding the ships is only half the battle. The group also synthesized data on treaties, corruption indexes, capabilities of navies and coast guards, EEZ size, and economy, as well as broader factors – Russia and China, for example, probably have little interest at the moment in assisting a U.S. federal agency – to help the NGA identify which boats the U.S. or an ally has a good chance of catching. “I think it helped the NGA understand that they have intelligence capabilities, and this is a problem that could leverage intelligence capabilities, and they know where they fit into the whole puzzle,” McLane said. “Especially for these government agencies, if they have a new problem, just knowing where they fit into it can be a really good start.” Fishing with an F: Now a part of the Heinz College tackle box. Original Article: https://www.heinz.cmu.edu/media/2023/May/illegal-unregulated-unreported-fishing-capstone-project-national-geospatial-intelligence-agency

Carnegie Mellon University, School of Computer Science Application Deadline: Until position has been filled. The School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University has a post-doctoral opening to work on an interdisciplinary project focused on the development and evaluation of methodologies and best practices designed to support privacy and AI threat modeling and mitigation. The project takes a user-focused perspective to modeling, identifying and mitigating threats and will initially focus on threats associated with inadequate support for notice and choice. The project will be informed by threat modeling frameworks such as LINDDUN as well as work on the design and evaluation of effective privacy notices and choices, extending this work to new threats associated with AI. This work will be co-led by Prof. Lorrie Cranor and Prof. Norman Sadeh. The successful candidate will have a PhD in computer science, information science or a related discipline. The ideal candidate will have a background in usable privacy or security as well as a general understanding of AI and a general interest in public policy and ethics. Preference will be given to candidates who also have some familiarity with threat modeling frameworks such as LINDDUN and/or privacy-by-design concepts. Candidates are expected to be capable of working under limited supervision, be well organized and have strong communication skills. They are also expected to have experience collaborating with others in the context of large-scale research projects. Actual work is expected to involve a mix of conceptual design, prototyping, and empirical evaluation with a particular focus on human subject experiments. The successful candidate is expected to publish papers in top-tier conferences and journals along with other faculty and students. Initial appointments will be for one year with option of renewal for an additional one or two years subject to performance and availability of funding. The start date is negotiable with a preference for people who can start in early Fall 2023. Carnegie Mellon offers competitive salaries and benefits. To be considered for this position, interested candidates should forward their resume along with the names of 3 references to: Ms. Linda Moreci S3D – School of Computer Science 5000 Forbes Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3891 - USA Tel: +1-412-268-9934 Email: laf20@cs.cmu.edu

The European / African Regional Doctoral Seminars Series is a forum for doctoral students to present their research. It grew out of a collaboration between the Berlin and Copenhagen iSchools more than a decade ago, and recently expanded to include any interested iSchool doctoral student worldwide. It is managed by Regional Chair Koraljka Golub of Linnaeus University and Linnaeus doctoral student Romain Herault. The presentations are conducted in English on Zoom. Using Visual Social Media Data to Better Understand Food Cultures in the UK: The Case of Deliciously Ella The most recent installment of the Series took place 20 May, 2022. In the first of two presentations, Ph.D. candidate Alexandra Boutopoulou of the University of Sheffield explained how her study of 4,000 Instagram images reveals that “nothing is what it appears to be” in the world of wellness blogging. Boutopoulou used an analytical method that she calls Comparative Instachronics to trace the evolving career of Deliciously Ella, a well-known food blogger. According to Boutopoulou, Deliciously Ella’s blog was initiated to address personal health issues through so-called “clean-eating”, and Instagram images show its progression through multiple stages into “a pure marketing story”. A 20-minute video of her presentation is available on the iSchools website. Unveiling Predatory Practices in Academic Research The second presentation was by Silvia Maccarini, a beginning doctoral student at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, titled Unveiling Predatory Practices in Academic Research. She examined predatory publishers, who exploit the need of academics to be published while offering little in return. A video of Maccarini’s presentation is also available on the website. Although the Series started as a European initiative, any iSchool doctoral student worldwide may now take part, either as observer or presenter. If you are interested in presenting your research, contact iSchools Ph.D. Student Representative Romain Herault for information on submitting a proposal. Upcoming seminars will be posted to the Doctoral Seminar Series webpage and iSchools Events Calendar as they are developed. Learn more and view all past presentations on the iSchools website.

The iConference has twice offered a Chinese-language papers track, and iConference 2023 will continue that tradition, as well accepting papers in Spanish and Portuguese. The iSchools organization represents more than 120 information schools worldwide, and while English remains the primary language of its annual iConference, accepting research papers in these additional languages more fully reflects the international nature of the conference and organization. This is just the latest step in the iSchools' ongoing commitment to globalism. 2012 marked the first time the iConference was held outside the U.S., and 2014 the first time it was held outside of North America. When Wuhan University hosted the iConference in 2017, a Chinese-language track was introduced and attracted almost 40 percent of all papers submitted that year. Since then, iConference hosting has rotated regularly among the iSchools’ global regions. Meanwhile, the iSchools Doctoral Dissertation Award competition began accepting dissertations in their original language. And when the iConference was again hosted by a Chinese School in 2021 (Renmin University of China), the Chinese papers track was reintroduced with similarly successful results. Now, the iSchools expect to make the Chinese Papers Track a permanent addition to the iConference program. This means that every year, Chinese scholars will have the opportunity of submitting work to this track in their native language. The Spanish and Portuguese Papers Track may also become permanent in time, depending on author interest and the availability of reviewer resources. Submissions to these tracks will be subject to double-blind review by reviewers fluent in each of their respective languages. The addition of these tracks introduces logistical challenges, including the recruitment of a sufficient pool of qualified reviewers. The conference organizers are confident these can be addressed with the help of the global information community. See instructions below on volunteering to review. Scholars are now invited to make submission to all iConference tracks per the submission guidelines on our website; papers and posters are due 1 September. We invite scholars fluent in Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese to volunteer as reviewers. Email staff@ischools-inc.org with subject line "volunteer reviewer". Include name, affiliation and language(s) in which you can review.

Climate change represents a growing research area in most parts of the world. A quick search of Google scholar shows over 4 million hits on a search for “climate change“, and a more detailed search would likely produce even more hits. A look at universities that belong to the iSchools shows that most do research on climate issues, even though the programs are not necessarily associated with the iSchools themselves. In the information world, climate has become big business. Climate information can be controversial. There are political leaders in most countries who both deny the evidence of climate change, and deny the role of humans in creating the conditions for atmospheric warming. Complex information issues are rarely completely without controversy. An important task is to separate fact from fiction, reliable information from speculation. Information quality is a long-standing concern that dates back to the iSchools‘ roots in the library world and information quality is an issue in every aspect of climate research. In the iSchools organization we currently support a number of special interest groups, and hope to expand to include iSchools scholars who would like to focus on climate issues. Such a group could develop in a number of ways, including sharing information about how their home universities do climate research, or creating criteria to judge the quality of climate information (including climate disinformation). As with all of the iSchools special interest groups, it will be up to those in the group to decide its direction and preferences. Those who have an interest in founding a group devoted to climate information issues should contact the iSchools staff at staff@ischools-inc.org. Depending on the level of interest, there could also be multiple groups based on region, time zone, or approach to the issues involved in climate research.

The iSchools Sponsored Research Fund supports research by the iSchool community through grants of up to $5,000. Grant applications were previously considered twice a year, but the submission date is changing to October so that the evaluation committee can meet to discuss all proposals face-to-face at the iConference. The committee consists of iSchools officers and Board members. The applicant should have a teaching position at a member-iSchool or be an iSchools doctoral student. The range of topics is open, and projects involving doctoral research or outreach to underrepresented regions are especially encouraged. Applications with external matching funds are a plus, but not a requirement. Decisions were recently announced for grant applications received through 1 March 2022. Of the six proposals received, the following three were selected for funding. One grant went to Henria Aton of the University of Toronto. In a proposal titled Tamil in the Archival Multiverse: Power, Memory, and Loss in Contemporary Sri Lankan Archives, Aton requested support for a two-month dissertation research trip to Sri Lanka. Her goal is to excavate “the entanglement of archives with politics in Sri Lanka, from the postcolonial moment to the present.” A second grant was awarded to Haley Bryant, also with the University of Toronto, for a proposal titled Digital Memory Work. Bryant will research “digital memory work: the assemblage of people, practices, protocols, knowledge, and technologies that enables digital cultural heritage projects in museums.” A third grant went to Heather Moulaison Sandy, Brian Dobreski, and Karen Snow from the University of Missouri, the University of Tennessee, and Dominican University, respectively, for their proposal entitled LGBTQ+ Identity, Code-Switching, and User Studies of Information Retrieval Systems. They investigate how “members of a marginalized community (e.g., LGBTQ+) engage in ‘code-switching’ to adjust the terminology they use regarding identity.” The next Sponsored Research Fund application deadline is 15 December 2022. Visit the Sponsored Research Fund webpage for more information, including judging criteria and an application form.

The desire for open access to scholarly information is a well-established principle, particularly among iSchools members. At the same time there has been discussion about how to improve mechanisms for sharing scholarly developments before they reach a stage where they are ripe for publication. Preprint options such as the ArXiv at Cornell have been around for a long time, and systems like SSRN let people in a broad range of disciplines read versions of potential publications before they are sent in for review. One of the flaws of pre-prints is their granularity: The research is presented as if it were a finished paper. Octopus is a new British project that „is designed for easy and rapid sharing and assessing of work, in smaller units. Octopus will be where researchers can record every piece of work that they have done, as they do it, to assert their priority and for it to be assessed and critiqued by their peers.” The intention is “to encourage a collaborative approach to the scientific process, with publications building on each other over time, regardless of authorship.”¹ The project website states: “Using Octopus, researchers can read, review and register ideas and findings - freely and immediately publishing their work in full detail, and in an open and transparent way and gaining the credit for it. … Initially, Octopus’s 8 publication types are most closely aligned with the scientific research process. These are problem, hypothesis, method, results, analysis, interpretation, real-world application and peer review.”² In some sense Octopus means having to rethink how we produce scholarly papers, and especially how the community is prepared to collaborate on research activities that may help other scholars with publications even at the expense of their own work. True collaboration sometimes involves a certain amount of selflessness that does not fit well with the competitive structure of academic promotion in many of our communities. 1: https://www.cni.org/topics/e-science/octopus-the-new-primary-research-record-for-science 2: https://beta.jisc.ac.uk/events/the-launch-of-octopus-the-new-primary-research-record

For some iSchools, Bibliometrics represent a staple research area, and bibliometrics have become especially important in recent decades as more and more universities use impact factors and rankings to evaluate faculty performance. This use of Bibliometrics is not free of controversy, as Retraction Watch noted in its latest edition of RW Daily “What role do bibliometrics ‘have beyond the institutional contexts in which...they were designed?’"¹ Eugenio Petrovich writes in his Blog post, which Retraction Watch references: “the numbers produced with the techniques of bibliometrics, such as the Journal Impact Factor or the h-index, have been put under the lens to better understand how they influence the behaviour of scientists and scholars and, more deeply, the very production of knowledge.”² Petrovich references a 2018 paper in arXiv called “Opium in science and society: Numbers” by Julian N. Marewski, Lutz Bornmann that says: “Which scientific author, hiring committee-member, or advisory board panelist has not been confronted with page-long ‘publication manuals’, ‘assessment reports’, ‘evaluation guidelines’, calling for p-values, citation rates, h-indices, or other statistics in order to motivate judgments about the ‘quality’ of findings, applicants, or institutions? Yet, many of those relying on and calling for statistics do not even seem to understand what information those numbers can actually convey, and what not.”³ One of the further concerns that Petrovich raises is “that journalists frequently use the IF as a quality seal for science news: the IF is presented as a warrant of scientific reliability for the news reported, without mentioning shortcomings or limitation of the IF itself.”⁴ For the iSchools community, what is interesting here is that one of our research and teaching areas plays a significant role in scholarly evaluation. Petrovich is writing primarily about Italy, but many universities in many countries have an equally strong focus on evaluation using bibliometric methods. If nothing else, it serves as a sign of the influence of information science on the academic world. 1: https://mailchi.mp/retractionwatch/the-rw-daily-dubious-botanist-newmaster-retractions-politics-bibliometrics-biotech-founder-faked-data?e=759608f9df 2: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2022/07/04/bibliometrics-at-large-the-role-of-metrics-beyond-academia/ 3: https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.11210 4: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2022/07/04/bibliometrics-at-large-the-role-of-metrics-beyond-academia/

Ivan Oransky and Adam Markus founded the Retraction Watch blog in 2010. The Blog keeps a record of retractions in academic journals and follows their progress, including whether journals actively remove retracted articles or flag them appropriately. The Retraction Watch Database is a later project that began with MacArthur foundation funding in 2015 as a way to organise information from the Blog.¹ Over time the Retraction Watch database has become a source for those interested in issues about information integrity. Seadle writes: “No reader should suppose that the Retraction Watch Database is a complete measure. It records only publically available journal (and some monographic) retractions, and the results vary periodically, presumably because of new information and occasionally because of reclassification of the disciplines or reasons for the retractions.”² The database has a relatively sophisticated search structure and its own thesaurus. It uses Boolean logic so that scholars can do complex searches involving, for example, the reason for a retraction in a particular subject involving a specific journal or publisher, a particular country, a data-range, and a specific retraction type. One of the current concerns in the academic community is the frequency with which new articles cite retracted papers, whose results are arguably no longer reliable. Searching the database can help scholars avoid the embarrassment of citing a retraced work, and can assist journal editors with the review process. The database emphasizes medical and biological topics, partly because journals in those areas have been particularly active in trying to discover problems. Those who work on medical informatics may well already be active users of the database. Unfortunately their funding is at risk. Oransky writes: “curating and maintaining the more comprehensive database of retractions available -- more than 35,000 and counting, with more than 3,500 entered every year -- requires continuous resources, and we have not had a grant for this work in five years.”³ Without community support, such projects are hard to sustain. 1: Markus, Adam, and Ivan Oransky. n.d. ‘From ScienceWriters: Retraction Watch Receives $400,000 Grant’. Accessed 15 July 2022. https://www.nasw.org/article/sciencewriters-retraction-watch-receives-400000-grant. 2: Seadle, Michael. 2022. The Measurement of Information Integrity. Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/The-Measurement-of-Information-Integrity/Seadle/p/book/9780367565695. 3: Oransky, Ivan. n.d. ‘The Retraction Watch Database Needs Your Help’. Accessed 15 July 2022. https://mailchi.mp/retractionwatch/scholarship-appeal-july-2022.

Many iSchools have programs involving the scholarly and practical aspects of digital archiving. This work often only focuses on text-based documents, even though a wealth of oral and visual materials exists reaching back into the nineteenth century. A group of scholars in Japan are now trying a new approach to bring historical information to life via “the colorization of black-and-white photos using artificial intelligence (AI) technology”¹ . As our former Asia Pacific regional chair Professor Shigeo Sugimoto of Tsukuba University writes about the exhibition of Prof. Hidenori Watanave’s AI work at the New York office of the University of Tokyo: “this event will bring some new thoughts and ideas of digital archiving to the iSchools community.”² The event is called Convergence of Peace Activities. Connecting and Integrating by Technologies and will take place on 6-7 August, 2022. Those who want to attend the event will need to register. The project focuses on “the relationship between art and design and the memory of disasters.”³ “When visualizing the colors that photographs should have had, the impressions of ‘freezing’ in black-and-white photographs are ‘rebooted,’ and viewers can more easily imagine the events depicted. This bridges the psychological gap between past events and modern daily life, sparking conversations.”⁴ Watanave’s work also makes extensive use of maps to help people get a more complete sense of where events took place. Maps of the current conflict in Ukraine are also available. Some scholars disparage colourising black and white photographs for undermining their genuineness. The situation changes, however, when the alternation is done openly and makes a deliberate scholarly point in order to enable people to see the original in ways that are intellectually transformative. In that case the alteration is no different than the approach that NASA and the European Space Agency use to make colour versions of cosmic events based on data that were not an integral part of an original photograph, or when optical character recognition transforms unfamiliar type-fonts to ones more familiar to contemporary readers. 1: Niwata, Anju, and Hidenori Watanave. 2019. ‘“Rebooting Memories”: Creating “Flow” and Inheriting Memories from Colorized Photographs’. In SIGGRAPH ASIA Art Gallery/Art Papers, 1–12. Brisbane Queensland Australia: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3354918.3361904. 2: Shigeo Sugimoto to Michael Seadle, “an event hosted by U.Tokyo: NY exhibit showcases use of tech to connect, converge peace activities”, 15 July 2022. 3: Hidenori Watanave to Michael Seadle, “Re: an event hosted by U.Tokyo: NY exhibit showcases use of tech to connect, converge peace activities”, 15 July 2022. 4: Niwata, Anju, and Hidenori Watanave. 2019. ‘“Rebooting Memories”: Creating “Flow” and Inheriting Memories from Colorized Photographs’. In SIGGRAPH ASIA Art Gallery/Art Papers, 1–12. Brisbane Queensland Australia: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3354918.3361904.