Future of Information Alliance.

A series of exciting events have been planned to mark the launch of the Future of Information Alliance, a campus-wide initiative at the University of Maryland.

Three remarkable guests we call our “Visiting Future-ists” will spend a week on campus brainstorming with students, faculty, administrators, staff and alumni to identify key information challenges that can best be addressed through interdisciplinary collaboration. They are:

• Dan Russell, Google’s “director of user happiness,” who leads efforts to improve the effectiveness of web searching; he was the keynote speaker at our campus-wide Future of Information Forum held last November;
• Mary Czerwinski, who manages the research on human-computer interaction at Microsoft and focuses on information visualization, group awareness and lifelogging;
• Abdur Chowdhury, former chief scientist at Twitter, who has been working toward improving the ability to separate “signal” from “noise” in the explosion of information on the Web.

During the week, there will be four two-hour events at the Colony Ballroom at the Stamp Student Union in which you can participate.

At the kickoff event, the Visiting Future-ists will describe their own work in helping to innovate for the future information environment, and they will discuss what they see as the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. They will also engage the audience in brainstorming aimed at identifying issues that can best be addressed through interdisciplinary research.

The three additional events, each involving the Visiting Future-ists, will focus on various aspects of the future of information:

• Creativity and Culture
• Transparency and Boundaries
• Science in Our Lives

Each of these three themed events will begin with brief presentations by several faculty members. They come from a very broad array of disciplines but share a passion for understanding the role of information in a wide variety of academic, cultural, and personal endeavors. The Visiting Future-ists will serve as discussants, both responding to what they hear from the faculty panelists and offering their own visions for the future of information as it relates to each of these themes. There will be plenty of opportunity, as well, for brainstorming with the attendees.

The Future of Information Alliance intends for all of these events to serve as catalysts for identifying important research questions that might be addressed in a collaborative and transdisciplinary way.

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