Hey, (new) Docs

This is Orientation Week for the Indiana University School of Informatics, which under the Marty Siegel vision involves full days of interaction with faculty, mingling and bonding with classmates, and information overload from every administrator who stands up and speaks. One of the hidden benefits, though, is that it gets you in some regular rhythm of making the trek to campus before classes begin the following week.

This orientation is a bit special for two reasons. First, we have a new dean meeting students for the first time. Second, we continue to grow in size as a community through the addition of a new crop of Ph.D. students. I got a sampler of both on Wednesday when Bobby Schnabel had an informal Q&A with the incoming class of doctoral students.

My new peers are an engaging bunch. I had already met several of them by virtue of recruiting visits or involvement with the Master’s program at SOI.

• Heather Wiltse (Social Informatics & HCI)—Heather came for a campus visit and sat in on Chris Ogan’s social informatics seminar. She comes from the IUPUI program with a background in HCI and psychology. She also was being recruited by our new Dean’s old hunting grounds before choosing IU.
• Travis Brown (HCI)—Travis got his MBA from Kelley down the road and is an adjunct faculty managing the Entrepreneurial Innovations Lab. He got his B.A. just as I was arriving to become the Web Services Coordinator at Kelley in ’99.
• Yong Li (Bioinformatics)—Originally from Peking University in China, Young is a transfer from masters program here at IU.
• Erik Wennstrom (Logical & Math Foundations)—Erik is also an internal transfer, coming from the Math department to Informatics with a bunch of credits already in the can. He was already taking a lot of Informatics classes, so the switch made sense. Before that, he studied math at Arizona State.
• Rui Wang (Security Informatics)—Rui comes from China and the National University of Defense Technology.
• Yupeng Gu (Music Informatics)—Yupeng previously studied at Zhejiang University in China.
• Lusha Wang (Security Informatics)—Lusha is another security student from China. She studied at Tongji University.
• Marty Plumbo (HCI)—Marty has varied interests, such as bioinformatics and security, but he came to SOI from Cincinnati to explore serious gaming. He’ll have a lot of friends in the Masters program and Telecom department. Since we already have another Marty, he may have to get used to being introduced as “Marty the Student.”
• Artemy Kolchinsky (Complex Systems)—A Russian from Champaign-Urbana, Artemy attended NYU and is interested in complexity, cognitive science and linguistics.
• Tonya Stoman (Security Informatics)—Tonya is fresh off of her masters degree in HCI here at the school and will now work under Jean Camp, and with Richie, in the new living lab across the street on Woodlawn (what we HCI-ers have been referring to as the Design House). Jean, Kay Connelly, Kalpana Shankar, and Lesa Lorenzen-Huber got a grant to research independent living for elderly residents.
• Mike Conover (Complex Systems, Bioinformatics, Discovery, & Social Informatics)—Like me, he’s a gray area scholar looking to find something new in between the formal research areas. Mike came to IU as a masters student last year from Arizona, transferring into the Ph.D. program.
• Wyatt Clark (Bioinformatics)—Wyatt is also an internal transfer. I’ve seen him here and there throughout the summer and never realized he had extended his stay. One of those bumped-into spots was Mac Experience, so say some prayers for his computer.

The dean was pressed for time and consumed most of his half hour going around the room getting the above information out of the first-year doctoral students. There were some questions and answers, the gist of which was:

Mike: How are you going to lead Informatics to become a known brand?
Dean: We need to come out with some very simple statements. I’d like to market test a set of words to strengthen our message. In the end, you get known for the work you do and for the people you turn out. […] We are going to look at the research areas and see where we can be internationally prominent. Those are the places where we will really need to make our mark.
Me: Does there need to be a unifying definition of informatics that encompasses all the research areas?
Dean: We do need that, in the next one or two years. I’m sitting with a bird’s-eye view. The definition should include sciences as well as application side of what we do.
Marty the Student: One of the strengths here is that everything is so broadly defined. There is a sense that you are encouraged to look around at different things. Let it be about more rather than less.
Artemy: Having a brand or special marketing words for informatics still needs to honor that idea.

These aren’t exact quotes; it is heavy on the paraphrasing of what was said. The above text is just the words I could quietly type while participating in the discussion.

A key take-home from the Dean’s comments is this bit: “We are going to look at the research areas and see where we can be internationally prominent.” That can be (and is being) interpreted in two ways. First, the optimistic take is that the School of Informatics can evolve from a petry dish of smart people and interesting research projects into a focused academic identity that rests on a few top-ranked pillars. One could easily see security and serious games becoming areas of opportunity to emphasize. The second perspective is a defensive one that views the school as a bunch of competing colleges fighting for the same resources. The winners earn staying power and prestige, and the losers get absorbed or marginalized. I am reminded of the entrepreneurial philosophy that powered the Kelley School of Business, treating every degree program as essentially a company in an open market. I’m not sure if they do that any more, but that way of doing academic business sure made things difficult for the internal IT department, since there wasn’t really a unifying identity beyond the million-dollar name.

The Dean has been busy recently. Some administrative shuffling has taken place, with Darrell Bailey—the founding executive associate dean of the School of Informatics at IUPUI—moving on to new responsibilities in international and community relations for the School. There is an important passage at the end of that press release:

Dean Schnabel also announced the formation of a leadership council for the School of Informatics consisting of the associate deans and chairs from Bloomington, the associate deans from IUPUI, the directors of finance and administration from each campus, and the director of planning. The group will be the primary strategic leadership group for the School and will alternate meeting between the two campuses, said Schnabel.

Deans and directors. No students. I exchanged a few emails with Dean Schnabel in July about giving students a voice. I have hopes that this will be a year the paying (and not paying) consumers can organize and become proactive. In the future, there should never be a leadership council or any other advisory body formed without representation from the student body.

The orientation session finished with Marty the Administrator emphasizing the charge the School is giving to the Ph.D. students. “None of the faculty has a degree in informatics,” notes Marty. “If you were in biology or mathematics, that wouldn’t be the case. Every faculty member would have a degree in their area.”

This echoes what David Hakken said last year in the now optional Introductory course. It is up to us to create a new field called Informatics. In that sense, the freedom this program offers and the emphasis on broadening exposure to different ideas is a nice trade-off for the certainty other more established fields provide.