Professor Vespignani

Alessandro Vespignani, Professor of Informatics, Associate Director of the Pervasive Technology Institute Digital Science Center and Director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research (CNetS) will give a talk on how physics and computers are working together to fight global pandemics like the H1N1 flu virus at the Indiana University Open House to be held on Saturday, October 31st by the IU Departments of Physics and Astronomy. His talk titled “Planning for the H1N1 flu – How physics and computers help to fight off global pandemics” will commence at 12.30 p.m. The event, set from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. taking place at Swain Hall West, 727 E. Third St., will also include guided tours of the IU Cyclotron Facility (IUCF) and the Kirkwood Observatory, along with designed-for-the-public lectures from astronomy Professor Emeritus Martin Burkhead and School of Informatics Professor Alessandro Vespignani. The attendance for this exciting event is free for all ages. More…

As program chair of an ACM conference (Hypertext 2009), I agree with both Lance Fortnow’s Viewpoint “Time for Computer Science to Grow Up” (Aug. 2009) and Moshe Vardi’s Editor’s Letter “Conferences vs. Journals in Computing Research” (May 2009). Moreover, as an interdisciplinary researcher, I experience firsthand how conference-driven publication practices hurt CS in terms of potential interdisciplinary collaboration, reach, and visibility.

That’s why I propose the abolition of conference proceedings altogether. Submissions should instead go to journals, which would receive more and better ones, with refereeing resources shifting naturally from conferences to journals. As a result, journals would improve their quality and speed up their processes. With the CS community’s full attention, the review process would be more rigorous and timely. Deadlines would no longer be so concentrated, and scientists would submit better work, revise as needed, and profit immediately from reviewer feedback; the same referee would judge improvements to a particular submission.

In many cases where conferences and journals are aligned, presentations could be invited from among the best papers published in the previous year. For newer areas and groundbreaking work, a conference or workshop could still accept submissions but would not publish proceedings. Publishing would be the job of journals.

ACM should shepherd such a transition as publisher of both the proceedings of most top computing conferences and of many top computing journals.

After writing my letter to the editor, it was brought to my attention that there already exists a model for the approach I proposed, envisioned by the VLDB Endowment as a transition from the VLDB conference proceedings to the PVLDB journal and ultimately to a Journal of Data Management Research.

Channel 13 video

A report on the popularity of Twitter at IU (which ranks among the top 10 universities on a number of metrics) has sparked some interest in the local media about work CNetS researchers are going on Twitter usage. An interview with Filippo Menczer, associate director of CNetS, appeared on the front page of the Herald-Times on Oct 16, 2009. Indianapolis NBC affiliate Channel 13 interviewed Menczer and CNetS postdoc Bruno Gonçalves for their news program that night. The story was also picked up by the Chicago Tribune, US News & World Report, The Republic, Indianapolis Star, NewsDay, Courier-Journal, Indianapolis Business Journal, News-Sentinel, WIBC, The Indy Channel, WHAS, Journal & Courier, Palladium-Item, Star Press, and IDS.

Professor Vespignani speaks on H1N1 vaccine

As Hoosiers roll up their sleeves to take the seasonal flu shots, researchers state that the H1N1 vaccination may take longer to arrive for large scale inoculation than anticipated. “It’s a race against time,” said IU School of Informatics professor Dr. Alessandro Vespignani who was on his way to an H1N1 conference Tuesday. He says by the time the vaccine is widely available, “it’s likely to have the peak of the disease earlier than an appreciable percentage of the population will be vaccinated.” He believes the H1N1 virus should hit its peak by about Halloween. By then, half of those who are going to get ill will have gotten sick, and only then will large supplies be available. “There is no need to panic. The disease is mild, it is under the constant attention of authorities,” Dr. Vespignani said. More…

Alessandro Vespignani, an associate director of the Pervasive Technology Institute Digital Science Center and director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research (CNetS) will serve on the editorial board of the new Journal of Computational Science (JoCS).

JoCS is an Elsevier Science Journal for novel results in computational science edited by P.M.A. Sloot. The journal aims to be an international platform to exchange novel research results in simulation based science across all scientific disciplines. It publishes advanced innovative, interdisciplinary research where complex multi-scale, multi-domain problems in science and engineering are solved, integrating sophisticated numerical methods, computation, data, networks, and novel devices.

JoCS is now accepting submissions, including full papers, short reports and letters. For more information and submission guidelines visit: www.elsevier.com/locate/jocs.

Cognitive scientists at Indiana University Bloomington received a five-year, $3.1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to create and employ innovative methods for training future scientists.

According to the NSF, the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program is intended to “catalyze a cultural change in graduate education” with innovative new models for graduate education and training that transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries. More…

Dr. Ben

Dr. Le-Shin

Congratulations to Ben and Le-Shin — er, Dr. Markines and Dr. Wu! They both successfully defended their dissertations this summer, earning their PhD!

• Mark’s paper What’s in a session: tracking individual behavior on the web was nominated for the Best Paper Award.
• Heather presented the demo Incentives for social annotation about the prototype Firefox extension for GiveALink.org, and the tagging game. (Heather is also demoing at SIGIR’09 in Boston.)
• I presented the demo Sixearch.org 2.0 peer application for collaborative web search about the latest release of Sixearch.
• Ben presented his poster on A scalable, collaborative similarity measure for social annotation systems.

SoIC logo

Important changes in the school go into effect July 1, 2009: The IUB part of the school is now named School of Informatics & Computing and we won’t have internal departments (CS and Informatics) anymore. Faculty will be organized in three internal, transparent (invisible), anonymous divisions. I chair one of these, internally referred to as divA (we are divA faculty)… Seriously, I hope this will help us market our brand better for its breadth, attract more students, improve our ranking, and get rid of some arbitrary/historical internal barriers to innovative curriculum and interdisciplinary research.