The world’s leading organization for information research, ASIS&T, has awarded the 2016 John Wiley & Sons Best JASIST Paper Award to iSchool professor Dr. Randolph Bias and his doctoral graduate, Dr. Sheng-Cheng "Hans" Huang, for their work on neuroimaging and information systems. The honor will be presented at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology in Copenhagen, Denmark.
The pair co-authored the prize-winning paper with Dr. David Schnyer, a UT Austin professor of psychology and neuroscience. Titled “How are icons processed by the brain? Neuroimaging measures of four types of visual stimuli used in information systems,” the article was published in April 2015 by the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST).
Through their investigation of the brain’s ability to process icons, pictures, Chinese characters and English words, the authors found that icons are not as efficient as words in conveying meaning. Their study also shows that neuroscience data can be used to better understand individual or group differences when people interact with computers.
Dr. Bias joined the iSchool faculty in 2003 and Dr. Huang earned his MSIS and doctorate from the iSchool and is now a user experience researcher at OpenText, an information management software company.
The John Wiley & Sons Best JASIST Paper Award was established in 1969 and recognizes the best refereed paper published in the volume year of the Journal of the Association for Information Science (JASIST) preceding the ASIS&T annual meeting.