1998 LACASIS Fall Workshop
Speaker Biographies and Abstracts

Eduard Hovy

Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California

http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/nlp-at-isi.html

Eduard Hovy is the director of the Natural Language Group at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California, and is a member of the Computer Science Departments of USC and of the University of Waterloo. He completed a Ph.D. in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence) at Yale University in 1987. His research focuses on machine translation, automated text summarization, text planning and generation, and the semi-automated construction of large lexicons and terminology banks; the Natural Language Group at ISI currently has projects in most of these areas. He is the author or editor of three books and approximately 100 technical articles.

The Web has been a blessing and a curse for R&D in Natural Language Processing (NLP). The things NLP can do are increasingly appreciated; but we also stand exposed: the shortcomings of things we can't do are woefully obvious. Modern information access systems usually overwhelm the user with information. Whether you use a web search engine or a information retrieval system operating on a text database, a query for information usually results in hundreds of thousands of documents. Seldom are all of these relevant, but how to prune out the irrelevant ones is not clear. When foreign texts come in, the amazing strengths of machine translation systems contrast with their puzzling inability. Recent research shows that automated text summarization may be just around the corner--although you can be sure that it will not work well on Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky. This talk will take you on a tour of the various capabilities, highlight some of the key technology, and point out how the advent of the web is driving R&D in new directions.

Nancy is the Principal Librarian, Reference Services, Santa Monica Public Library, Santa Monica, CA. She is also an Adjunct Instructor with the UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Science

Where Community and Context Are King: Public Libraries and Information Literacy
"I do not believe content in this new environment is king . . . When you look at that amount of content, content is no longer the issue: it’s community and context, being able to maneuver around all of that information and being able to do it within an environment that you feel comfortable with . . . " (Ted Leonsis, President, AOL)

The public is looking for more from their public library these days and if they expect to find the "same old thing" we are in trouble. Information literacy and knowledge management are critical. It may be too soon to know if we are doing a good job but if we’re not already doing so we’d better initiate creative strategies to deal with the changing information environment and make resources available, reliable, and understandable for the community. Let’s hope our communities expect their libraries to be, as William Fulton says in a recent Los Angeles Times column, the "new glue" drawing people back into community life.

Ken Pflueger has a Master's Degree in Educational Technology from Arizona State University and a Master's in Library and Information Science from Western Michigan University. Currently, he is Associate Provost for Information Services at California Lutheran University, where he was responsible for the restructuring of an administrative unit which includes the traditional area of computing, library, media services and telecommunications. He has also worked at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji where he was involved in writing distance education course materials for the library and information studies degree program.

We need to move beyond defining "information literacy" as merely how to use the computer or how to access information. While those are important and necessary skills they are not the sum total of what is needed to be an "educated citizen" in the information age. Our definition of information literacy must encompass a critical reflection of the social, cultural and ethical context and impact of information. A key component of information literacy is that of the critical assessment of information and its sources. A major challenge in the educational setting is to confront the development of this literacy in the face of deficiencies in the traditional areas of text and quantitative literacy and appreciate the intertwined nature of the three.

Leta (Li) Hunt is member of the Information Services Division Faculty at the University of Southern California. She is currently the senior systems analyst for the Integrated Archives (IDA) Version 1.1 software development. Li was the project manager for the Information System for Los Angeles (ISLA) project and for the development of IDA Version 1.0 (Proof of Concept)software. She came to USC after five years at the University of Illinois Map and Geography Library where she was responsible for Geographic Information System (GIS) reference and development.

Integrated Digital Archives (IDA) is a search and retrieval software which enables users to define on a single screen any number or combination of space, time, keyword, or format parameters. IDA Version 1.0 Proof of Concept was completed in June, 1998. Version 1.1 is expected to be complete in December, 1998. The Information System for Los Angeles project is a developing digital library of multi-disciplinary materials in multiple formats about the Los Angeles region. The database will be accessed by the IDA software.

Jeff Smith currently holds the title of "Evangelist, Collaboration Products" at NTT MCL but still tries to devote part of his time to research on CSCW, organizational theory, and knowledge management (whatever that means). He is one of the founders of NTT MCL and lived in Japan for five years working for NTT in Tokyo prior to moving to Palo Alto.

Living Web is a distributed architecture, tools, and enterprise solutions based on existing and emerging Internet standards designed to enable intellectual teamwork in intranets and extranets. Living Web represents the next generation of Internet applications which integrate not only the tools used for intellectual teamwork, but also the ongoing output and processes of teams. Leveraging the distributed nature of work in modern organizations and realizing the potential of self-organizing teams allows organizations to deliver better products and services faster and more effectively.

Living Web is the result of nearly five years of research at NTT in Japan and at NTT MCL in Palo Alto, CA. The EColabor project (Elaboration and Collaboration), which is the first application built on Living Web, started as a system to support software requirements analysis with a focus on traceability of communication, agreement, and change management and has since been generalized for all types of document production.

NTT Multimedia Communications Laboratories (MCL) is a subsidiary of Nippon Telegraph Telephone Corporation and was established in 1997 as an outpost for NTT for the purpose of combining technologies from Japan and America to address future business needs.

EColabor Project: http://www.ecolabor.com/

http://www.isi.edu/~knoblock/

Craig Knoblock is a Project Leader at the Information Sciences Institute and a Research Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Southern California. He is also on the faculty of the Integrated Media Systems Center, which is a NSF Engineering Research Center at USC. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1991 and joined USC that year. His current research interests include information gathering agents, information integration, automated planning, machine learning, and knowledge discovery. For the last six years he has been working on the problem of information integration from heterogeneous data sources. He is one of the primary architects of the SIMS information mediator, which builds on work in planning, machine learning, and knowledge representation. He currently leads the Ariadne project, which is addressing the problem of integrating internet and intranet information sources.

Abstract

The Web is based on a browsing paradigm that makes it difficult to retrieve and integrate data from multiple sites. Today, the only way to do this is to build specialized applications, which are time-consuming to develop and difficult to maintain. We are addressing this problem by creating the technology and tools for rapidly constructing information agents that extract, query, and integrate data from web sources. Our approach is based on a simple, uniform representation that makes it efficient to integrate multiple sources. Instead of building specialized algorithms for handling web sources, we have developed methods for mapping web sources into this uniform representation. This approach builds on work from knowledge representation, machine learning and automated planning. The resulting system, called Ariadne, makes it fast and cheap to build new information agents that access existing web sources. Ariadne also makes it easy to maintain these agents and incorporate new sources as they become available.

Jody Simon joined the Amgen Libraries as an Associate Manager for the Library Systems and Development group last year. After nine years in the laboratory, she accepted a position providing scientific software support and systems administration for Research. She has been a user of the library for many years and participated on cross-functional teams concerning issues related to both Research and the Library. The past year has been interesting and educational to change from a pure information consumer to the side of information provider.

Karl Geiger began working with library and information retrieval systems at the University of Southern California in 1987. While at USC he worked on numerous projects including USCInfo, the Online Chronicle of Higher Education, and ISLA. In November 1995 Karl left USC for the Amgen Libraries where he has been building AMINO (AMgen Information Online), a web-based IR and knowledge system. He is a member of the IEEE Computer Society, ACM, and AAAS.

Debbie Hansen is Associate Director of San Jose State University's School of Library and Information Science. She administers the school's Southern California Campus and has helped design and implement their distance education program.

Jacqueline Lesch is the SLIS Technology Administrator responsible for distributing information resources to the school's distance education students.

Technologies have made it a reality to provide resources to users from remote locations. Debbie Hansen will provide an overview of San Jose State University (SJSU) SLIS's distance education program and discuss how the school is using new technologies to enhance and extend its course offerings statewide; and Jacqueline Lesch will describe the technology resources made available to SJSU SLIS distance education students and raise issues regarding their distribution and access.