The School of Information Sciences held its annual Research Showcase on Wednesday. The event centered around human-related research, featuring several presentations, posters and a keynote speaker.
The showcase started with a poster session in which researchers presented their work on various interdisciplinary topics, ranging from the effects of adult role models in youth development to ethics in geospatial data science.
Alex Kim, sophomore in Information Sciences, contributed to the research with a presentation titled “Assessing Citation Integrity in Biomedical Publications: Annotation and NLP Models.” The work uses natural language processing and artificial intelligence models to correct the issue of improper citations in biomedical publications.
“I reached out to professors because I was always interested in NLP,” Kim said. “I’m an undergrad and this was my first research, so I wanted to get involved and get used to the topic.”
Kim contributed to the project on several levels, working with data processing, visualization and NLP models.
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Keynote speaker Jooyoung Seo, assistant professor in Information Sciences, spoke after the poster session. Seo’s presentation, titled “Beyond Sight: Envisioning Data Science Through Multimodal Access,” gave insight into his experiences as a blind data scientist and his work in making data science more accessible.
Seo’s demonstration was followed by several short presentations and a break.
After the break, several other researchers presented their work, including Smit Desai, graduate student studying information sciences. Desai spoke about voice user interfaces, such as Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri, demonstrating that as humans we naturally associate characteristics with these VUIs.
Playing two audio clips, one where Siri recounted the score of a soccer game and the other in which Siri responds to the question “How do I know if I have Alzheimer’s?,” Desai highlighted the potentially problematic relationship between individuals and the voice user interfaces they use.
The showcase ended at 4:30 p.m. with a poster showcase and was held at the Illini Union.
