Two research projects at GSLIS recently received support
from the Illinois-Sweden Program for
Educational and Research Exchange (INSPIRE) program.
Michael Twidale, professor, and Cathy Blake, associate professor and associate director of the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS), have received a $7,000 grant from INSPIRE. Their project, “Collaborative Information Seeking and Data Use,” is a partnership with Preben Hansen, associate professor at Stockholm University and 2013-2015 GSLIS Research Fellow.
The use of data is often more collaborative than we allow for in current settings. Scientists work together to create data, and also to make use of what they or others have collected. To be used properly, data always needs interpretation. When scientists re-use data that others have collected, or integrate information from multiple datasets, there is a risk that information necessary to accurately interpret the data will be lost. This risk increases as we move towards the “big data” era, where huge merged datasets may be detached from critical local knowledge about what the numbers in them really mean. Fortunately collaborative approaches to seek and re-use data can provide a powerful way to add back in some of the context that has been lost.
Inspired by techniques from agile software development, this project will look at ways to work quickly and iteratively towards uncovering preliminary research insights into collaborative information seeking and collaborative data use. In addition to developing grant proposal ideas and exploring ideas for the collection of sample pilot data, project partners will write several concept papers outlining the research agenda in this new field for submission to journals and conferences.
J. Stephen Downie, professor and associate dean for research, received a $7,200 grant from INSPIRE in support of his project, DRAMMA: Description and Retrieval of Affect and Mood in Music Audio. Downie and his team at the International Music Information Retrieval Systems Evaluation Laboratory (IMIRSEL) will collaborate with Anders Friberg of the Sound and Music Computing Lab at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
Both Friberg and Downie have done complementary research in audio music mood and affect analysis over the years and this new collaboration will allow both groups to develop a framework within which new high-quality mood and affect datasets can be specified, created, tested, and deployed. This May, Downie and doctoral student Kahyun Choi will travel to Stockholm to collaborate on the design of data collection strategies and participate in classes at KTH.
Both groups will attend ISMIR 2014 in Taipei, Taiwan, in October and will present the results of their collaboration to the larger music information retrieval community.
The INSPIRE program is a collaboration between the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and several research and educational institutions in Sweden. In addition to providing funding in support of collaborative research projects and education programs, INSPIRE offers research and education exchange opportunities for faculty and students, and hosts symposia and summits to further partner collaborations.
Photo attribution: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0. Generic; (photo by edward stojakovic)
