Special Lecture

Synthesizing Knowledge from Disagreement

Wednesday, February 18, 2015
4:10 pm to 5:30 pm
Jodi Schneider

Synthesizing Knowledge from Disagreement

Synthesizing Knowledge from Disagreement

New methodologies for information synthesis that combine machine and human intelligence are needed to make sense of the overwhelming amounts of information being produced each day. Of particular interest are novel methods that support the resolution of contested information and disagreement. I will present a new method for supporting online sense-making that has been applied to Wikipedia. Decisions are made through open discussions; approximately 500 discussions per week concern whether a particular topic should be deleted from the encyclopedia and may involve from 2 to 200 people. I will discuss a new method and a reconfigurable Web interface that provides meaningful support for these discussions. I will then discuss how innovative methods for tracking scientific discourse could be translated into the biomedical domain to support the systematic review process.

Jodi Schneider earned her Ph.D. in informatics at the National University of Ireland Galway in 2014. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at INRIA, the national French Computer Science Research Institute, funded by a highly competitive ERCIM Marie Curie Fellowship. Jodi's research has been published in journals such as Semantic Web and Biomedical Semantics and in top computing conferences such as the ACM's Computer-Supported Collaborative Work. Her dissertation used semantic web technology to organize Wikipedia information quality discussions. Currently she is working with pharmacists to design an intelligent crowdsourcing system for improving clinical drug information sources.

Dr. Schneider holds an M.S. in library & information science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and an MA in mathematics from the University of Texas at Austin. She previously worked as science library specialist at Amherst College and as web librarian at Appalachian State University. Her contributions to library technology include founding the Code4Lib Journal and co-authoring the "W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group Final Report”, which has been translated into French, Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese.
 

Last updated:

August 23, 2016