University of Maryland, Information School team visit ISiM for student exchange and other collaborative programs

In a very unique initiative, a team lead by Dr. Douglas W. Oard, University of Maryland, USA including Professors Leah Findlater and Kanti Srikantaih , visited the International School of Information Management (ISiM), first and only I-School in India to discuss the modalities of collaboration between the two institutions with respect to the following :

• Student Exchange programs including a semester at University of Maryland for ISiM students, leading to a possible joint degree program
• Faculty exchanges to give Maryland iSchool faculty a chance to live, teach, and conduct research in India for a semester, and ISiM faculty the opportunity to do the same.
• Maryland iSchool now has two online degree programs and teaching possibilities for faculty at both Schools through these programs.
• Collaborative research that would continue by leveraging relationships built initially through faculty exchanges, and that could benefit from collaboration networks at each institution.
• Study abroad programs in India for Maryland iSchool students during Winter Term every two years (each cohort in our two-year Masters programs would have an opportunity to participate).
• Targeted recruiting for the Maryland iSchool Ph.D. program from among ISiM students.

This is a very unique and mutually beneficial collaboration that is envisaged to strengthen international academic collaboration.

Brief bios of the visiting team from Maryland:

Prof. Douglas Oard

Douglas Oard is a Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, with joint appointments in the College of Information Studies and the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, where he currently serves as director of the Computational Linguistics and Information Processing lab. He earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland. Dr. Oard’s research interests center around the use of emerging technologies to support information seeking by end users. His recent work has focused on interactive techniques for cross-language information retrieval, searching conversational media such as speech and email, evaluation design for e-discovery in the TREC Legal Track, and support for sense-making in large digital archival collections. Additional information is available at http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~oard/.

Prof. Leah Findlater

Leah Findlater is an Assistant Professor in the College of Information Studies and an Affiliate Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research in human-computer interaction focuses on lowering barriers to technology use and information access by supporting users with a range of abilities and educational levels. This work has led to a number of publications in top-tier academic venues and has been recognized with two best paper awards and five honorable mentions at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM CHI). Prior to starting at the University of Maryland, Leah worked as an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Information School at the University of Washington. She received her PhD in Computer Science in 2009 from the University of British Columbia, where she worked with Professor Joanna McGrenere and was awarded an IBM Centers for Advanced Studies Fellowship. She has collaborated with IBM Toronto Software Lab and with Microsoft Research in India and Redmond, WA.

Taverekere (Kanti) Srikantaiah

Taverekere (Kanti) Srikantaiah, is a Visiting Professor at the iSchool, University of Maryland. He served as Director and Professor, Center for Knowledge Management at Dominican University from September 1997 through August 2010. Before joining Dominican, Kanti had a distinguished career at the World Bank where he headed varied and important assignments, in the areas of information management, at headquarters in Washington D.C. (and also at the World Bank’s field offices in Africa and Asia).