Information Science at the Institute of Information & Computing Sciences (ICS)

Computing Science in Utrecht has a more than 25-year tradition and is famous for its fundamental research in IT. The last decennium its focus shifted gradually towards more applied sciences in ICT. One of the consequences of this shift was the foundation of the scientific research and education in Information Science at the ICS in January 1999. The new multi-disciplinary group was formed by pulling together different domains and people from various faculties inside and outside Utrecht University. The vision behind this move was to enlarge the scope of the ICS in such a way that the Institute would be able to span nearly the full spectrum of ICT from applied to fundamental information and computing sciences.

The maiden year for the Information Science curriculum was the year 2000. Since 2002 the curriculum follows the European-style Bachelor/Master program guidelines. Currently we have a 3-year undergraduate program 'Information Science' that leads to a BSc in Information Science. The program offers both a major and a minor program in Information Science. Students that want to follow a 2-year international graduate program in 'Information Science' can choose from two master programs: Content and Knowledge Engineering (CKE) or Business Informatics (MBI). Both lead to a MSc in Information Science.

Information Science in Utrecht is a steadily developing area. Today Information Science consists of 3 groups covering the following knowledge domains:  Electronic Document Technology (EDT), Cognition & Communication (C&C) and Organization & Information (O&I). This part of the website focusses mainly on the research activities of Information Science in the first two groups and represents the research concentrated in the Center for Content and Knowledge Engineering (CCKE).

CCKE News

Two recent CCKE dissertations (oct 2006).
In october 2006 two CCKE PhD projects were finished:
Stacey Nagata successfully defended (12 oct) her dissertation "User Assistance for Multitasking with Interruptions on a Mobile Device". Stacey returned to the USA, and is now uability expert at Intel Company.
Also Ion Juvina successfully defended (19 oct) his dissertation "Development of a Cognitive Model for Navigating on the Web". More information: see igitur-archive.library.uu.nl/dissertations/2006-1025-201007/title.pdf 
Ion has now a post-doc position at the Psychology department at Carnegie Mellon University (USA).

Innovational Research Incentive (Veni) for CCKE researcher
Dr. Virginia Dignum has been awarded a three year grant (Veni) from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) to do research on the influence of organizational characteristics on the knowledge sharing and overall performance of a group. The project entitled "Supporting Knowledge Sharing" combines the development of simulation models and tools, based on multi-agent systems, with empirical studies using human groups in a controlled setting. The project has started in June 2006 and involves several Master students and a research assistant.

Free membership for students of SGML/XML Users Group Holland
We have a long lasting collaboration with the SGML/XML Users Group Holland. The Institute is a corporate member of the Users Group and recently the collaboration has resulted in a free membership for all our students. The membership allows free access to seminars, the yearly XML Holland conferences and the very informative periodical <!ELEMENT.
For more information see: Student membership

NWO-Casimir project at CCKE
Drs. Anita de Waard of the Advanced Technology Group (Elsevier), Elsevier and the Center for Content and Knowledge Engineering have been awarded a four year grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) to develop models and investigate tools for a new way of authoring scientific papers. The project is part of NWO's Casimir program. The project, titled "A Semantic Structure for Scientific Articles", was chosen after a lengthy and highly competitive review process. The grant will be awarded on December 20th by Dutch Ministers Van Der Hoeven (Education, Culture and Science) and Brinkhorst (Economic Affairs) at the NWO offices in The Hague. Anita's work will be jointly supervised by Dr. Marck Krellenstein (Elsevier) and Dr. Herre van Oostendorp (CCKE). The 4-year project starts january 2006.

CCKE Lecture in Fukuoka, Japan
On 22 October 2005, Dr. Virginia Dignum of the C&C group gave an invited talk entitled "Agent-Mediated Knowledge Management" at INAP2005 (the 16th International Conference on Applications of Declarative Programming and Knowledge Management) in Fukuoka, Japan. Abstract. Current developments in Knowledge Management (KM) concern the sharing and usage of knowledge in dynamic environments. The need for systems that both react to and anticipate the needs and expectations of users calls for flexible and adaptable development and implementation frameworks. These are exactly the characteristics that identify software agents and agent societies, which make natural the application of the agent paradigm in KM. This paper attempts to identify both the advantages of agents for KM, and the aspects of KM that can benefit most from this paradigm.

WITCHCRAFT in Utrecht
Dr. Frans Wiering (CCKE) has received a grant from the CATCH programme of the The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research for his 4-year WITCHCRAFT project. The aim of this project is to develop a fully-functional content-based retrieval system for folksong melodies stored as audio and notation. The system will be integrated in the Nederlandse Liederenbank ('Database of Dutch Songs') of the Meertens Instituut (http://www.meertens.knaw.nl/). The grant allows us to hire a Postdoc, a PhD student and a scientific programmer to execute this project. More information can be found at: http://www.cs.uu.nl/research/projects/witchcraft.

June 2005 - CCKE at Carnegie Mellon University
Ion Juvina (CCKE PhD student) on the project "Developing a Cognitive Model of Navigating on the Web" has recently completed the prestigious Summer School on Computational Cognitive Modeling under supervision of Prof. John R. Anderson at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA.

Presentation of all IS research on our plenary meeting in april 2005 See the poster gallery, presentations etcetera

Just appeared:
"Creation, Use and Deployment of Digital Information". Recently a textbook on the domain of Information Science edited by staff members of CCKE has been published: Van Oostendorp, H., Breure, L, & Dillon, A. (Eds) Creation, Use and Deployment of Digital Information. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
 
 

See: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.