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iFutures - first Information School doctoral conference taking place today


Taking place today 25th July 2013, iFutures is a one-day conference run by and for PhD researchers in the information science community. It has been organised by the Information School at the University of Sheffield to mark the 50th anniversary of the founding of the University’s Information Studies department.

Based on the theme of "The Next 50 years," our aim has been to create an event for future information science researchers and practitioners to explore the potential impact of our research, and determine how we can help shape the future of our discipline, both in academia and beyond.

We hope that the conference will provide a valuable opportunity for students to present innovative and forward-thinking research to their peers in a non-judgmental and supportive environment. Best Paper and Best Pecha Kucha prizes will be awarded.

Keynote speakers:

Diane H. Sonnenwald is Professor, Chair of Information & Library Studies at the School of Information and Library Studies at UCD, Dublin, Ireland, and an adjunct professor of computer science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is currently serving as Immediate Past President of ASIS&T, the Association for Information Science & Technology. She served as President of ASIS&T in 2011-2012. Diane is on the editorial boards of the Journal of the American Society of Information Science and Technology(JASIST), Information Research, and several other journals. 

Vanessa Murdock is a Principal Applied Researcher at Microsoft. Previously she was a Senior Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research in Barcelona, where she led the Geographic Context and Experience group. Her research interests focus on statistical retrieval methods for short texts such as sentences, image tags, ad creatives, and textual metadata, combining structured and unstructured information for applications such as local search, mobile search and geographic information retrieval. She holds a PhD from the University of Massachusetts, where she was a student of W. Bruce Croft. 

See http://ifutures.group.shef.ac.uk/ for more information about the conference.


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