"Information Systems that Transform Academic and Scholarly Practices"

Unmil Karadkar, Department of Computer Science, Texas A&M University

When: Tuesday, Nov 27th, 3.30pm
Where: SZB 556

Researchers and students alike recognize the potential of the Web as a useful tool that aids them in work. Access to this enormous, searchable document repository, coupled with increasingly powerful and affordable computers forms a compelling substrate for supporting our scholarly endeavors.

How can we leverage this evolving infrastructure to design better educational and research tools? Could we improve the quality of learning materials by using new technology? What can we do to engage students in the learning process? What information do students, teachers, and researchers need in order to be effective? How we present this information while incurring minimal cognitive overhead? Which educational and research processes can we support technologically? Which of these should we support? How can we invite participation from a large community to design domain-specific resource repositories?

In this talk, I will discuss issues that I have faced in designing novel research and learning environments with respect to two domains: humanities and life sciences.

Bio:

Unmil works at the intersection of information technology and human information behavior. His research focuses on harnessing the emerging information infrastructure to support, as well as enhance, scholarly and academic practices in diverse disciplines. His active collaborations include those with researchers in Art and Art History, Atmospheric Sciences, Hispanic Studies, Veterinary Medicine, and Computer Science. Unmil is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science at Texas A&M University. In his spare time, he collects dragons, plays racquetball and board games, and goes rock climbing.