Author Archives: Khoo Soo Guan, Christopher (Assoc Prof)

About Khoo Soo Guan, Christopher (Assoc Prof)

School of Communication and Information

Dr Brendan Luyt at COLIS 2010 conference

Dr Brendan Luyt presented a paper at the COLIS 2010 conference in London, 21-24 June. The paper was co-authored with Dr Intan Azura, who is teaching in the Policy and Leadership Studies Group, National Institute of Education, Singapore.

The sigh of the information literate: an examination of the potential for oppression in information literacy
By Brendan Luyt & Intan Azura
Abstract:
This paper uses Eugene Matusov and John St. Julien’s work on print literacy as a base for exploring how information literacy could be seen as an instrument of bureaucratic and colonial oppression. Three examples are given. The first involves the use of information literacy to push the norms of intellectual property protection, regardless of a wider technological and social context that suggest an ongoing and dramatic transfer of rights from the public to content producers. The second concerns the effects produced by a lack of attention to media monopolization in information literacy initiatives. The concentration of what is essentially a capitalist industry helps narrow the range of ideas and perspectives considered mainstream in society, adding to a new form of mental colonialization that information literacy embraces through its lack of critical attention. Finally, by not challenging the positivist conception of knowledge that animates much of the LIS field, oppression is further enabled as it continues a tradition in educational institutions of ignoring the conditions of textual production, which allows the work of bureaucratic inscription to continue unimpeded. But if it is the case that information literacy can contribute to oppress rather than liberate, it is certainly also the case that it does not have to do so. The nature of information literacy as an oppressive or liberating tool depends on how it is constituted by the wider LIS community. The hope of this paper is that by raising the possibility of information literacy oppression, the field as a whole can safeguard against it.

Admission interviews in Shanghai and Yangon

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The Division carried out overseas admission interviews in Shanghai and Yangon on March 28-29. Drs Chris Khoo and Margaret Tan, and Grad Manager Samantha Tay went to Shanghai to interview Chinese applicants. Drs Dion Goh and Brendan Luyt carried out the interviews in Yangon.

Samantha, Margaret and Chris conducted admission interviews in Shanghai

This Raffles City is in Shanghai!

Dr Shaheen conducted a training course in Lahore, Pakistan

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In December 2009, I spent two weeks in my hometown (Lahore, Pakistan) to visit my parents and other family members. On the invitation of Pakistan Library Association (PLA), I conducted a one-day training course on “Information Management in Learning Organizations’ on 23 December 2009 for local information professionals.

This course was jointly organized by PLA (Punjab), Knowledge and Information Management Academy (KIMA), and the Punjab University Library. The course was inaugurated by Prof. Mujahid Kamran, Vice Chancellor, University of the Punjab, who emphasized that library and information professionals need to develop new competencies and get ready to play an important role in the fast emerging knowledge society.

Some 50 LIS professionals participated in this course and I was very impressed with their enthusiasm and the level of interaction. I covered topics such as role of information management (IM) in learning organizations, information management cycle, IM and strategic planning, and information and knowledge audit. This event was repeatedly covered by one local TV channel in its evening news bulletins. My nieces and nephews were very excited to see it on TV.

Let me also tell you a little about my hometown. Lahore is a historical city and capital of Punjab province. It is the second largest city of Pakistan after Karachi and its population is estimated around 7.5 million. One common thing among people in Lahore and Singapore is their love for food. You can have plenty of choices as almost all types of cuisines are easily available in Lahore. However, Chinese restaurants are more popular, although food served by them is quite different from Chinese restaurants in Singapore. You can get more information about Lahore from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lahore.

Dr Shaheen conducting a workshop in Lahore

Dr Shaheen conducting a workshop on "Information Management in Learning Organizations" in Lahore

— Shaheen Majid

Congratulations to Dr Lee Chei Sian & Dr Alton Chua on winning AcRF research grants!

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Congratulations to Dr Lee Chei Sian and Dr Alton Chua on their sucessful AcRF research grant applications!

Investigating the Effective Use of Social Computing Applications: The Role of Individual Differences (PI: Lee Chei Sian) (see abstract below)
Automated User-Based Question-Answering System (PI: Alton Chua) (see abstract below)

Investigating the Effective Use of Social Computing Applications: The Role of Individual Differences (AcRF research grant, Principle Investigator: Dr Lee Chei Sian)

Social computing has transformed the way people communicate, share and collaborate online. Undoubtedly, the accessibility and shared computing resources brought about by social computing applications are having a profound impact on individuals and organizations. Here, a fundamental issue is the relationship between the type of applications available and the individuals that employ them. While work in this area is nascent, early research has indicated that individual differences appear to play an important role in how and what social computing applications (e.g. blogs, wikis, social network services) are used to explore opportunities, or to manage problems or issues. The objective of the project is to expand our knowledge on the use of a variety of social computing applications and how these applications can be integrated to afford individuals the resources they need to support social interactions at work or at play.

Automated User-Based Question-Answering System (AcRF research grant, Principle Investigator: Dr Alton Chua)

Unlike search engines, Question Answering (QA) systems provide concise answers to questions formulated in natural language. Automated QA systems accept users’ question and return sentences from Web pages deemed to contain relevant answers. On the other hand, user-based QA systems allow users to post questions and receive answers offered voluntarily by others. In Automated QA systems, research gaps exist in the area of question-clustering and answer-selection. In user-based QA systems, current research efforts fail to address how the heavy dependence on other users’ participation can be alleviated. Moreover, scholarly inquiries into these two systems have yet to dovetail into a composite research stream where techniques gleaned from automated QA systems could be exploited for user-based QA systems. For these reasons, this proposal seeks to develop a coalesced research perspective on QA systems. Specifically, its aims are to: (1) develop an efficacious question-clustering technique intended for managing user-generated content; (2) develop a theoretical model that selects and ranks answers; (3) design and develop a content-extraction system that harness content from Web 2.0 platforms; and (4) implement and evaluate an automated user-based QA system which does not rely on the goodwill of users’ participation.

Major research grants won by DIS faculty in 2008 & 2009

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DIS has been very successful in winning major research grants in the past 2 years. Major research grants won include:

Business models for Interactive Digital Media (IDM) services and policy implications for regulators (Principal investigator: Dr Ravi Sharma, Funding: NRF-IDM)
MobiTOP: A system for the mobile tagging of objects and people (PI: Dr Dion Goh, Funding: A*Star)
MARGE (Mobile Alternate Reality Gaming Engine) : Layering Gaming Interactions in Mobile Content Sharing Environments (PI: Dr Dion Goh, Funding: NRF-MDA)
Empirical Usability Studies with E-Learning Systems: Towards Executable Cognitive User Models as Design and Usability Evaluation Aids (PI: Dr Theng Yin Leng, Funding: A*STAR)
Promoting Exercise and Healthy Food Consumption: A Study on Senior Citizen’s Acceptance and Adoption of Digitally Mediated Fitness Games (PI: Dr Theng Yin Leng, Funding: Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Welfare Foundation)
Sentiment Summarization of Multiple Genre Review Documents (PI: Dr Na Jin Cheon, Funding: AcRF)

Welcome, Prof Edie!

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We welcome Prof Edie Rasmussen to the Division this semester, as Visiting Professor. Dr Rasmussen was the Director of the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies at the Univ. of British Columbia (UBC) from 2003-2008, and is on sabbatical from UBC. She was the external examiner for our MSc Information Studies programme from 2002-2006, and was a visiting lecturer in the Division in 1995.

At DIS, Dr Rasmussen is teaching a PhD-level course <em>Intelligent Information Retrieval</em>, and working on several research projects.

Dr Rasmussen (centre) tossing the Yusheng at Chinese New Year

H6662 Digital Preservation course

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What the instructor Dr Paul Wu says about H6662 Digital Preservation:

As students of information science, we are keenly aware of the challenge of finding the right information at the right time against the information deluge in this digital age. However, few have realized that even with the information found at hand, we are still in danger of losing it soon if we don’t consider digital preservation seriously.

National culture institutions have been aware of the threats to the longevity of national digital heritage in the past two decades. The film Into the Future: On the Preservation of Knowledge in the Electronic Age (accessible on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTzLO2SHTEI as a four part series) highlights how much more fragile digital information is than information traditionally carried on paper files. That is why the National Library Board of Singapore, together with our school, and a consortium of around 30 national libraries around the world, have endeavored to develop the Web Archives of Singapore since 2006, to protect Singapore’s Web heritage now and in the future. Still, it is too late to preserve the earlier websites of NTU!

At the personal level, our common experience with HTTP error 404 page-not-found messages is evidence of the risks associated with digital information. The photos we post on Flickr and Facebook, videos on YouTube, and mp3/4 on iTune are also in danger of disappearing on us. You may have heard about a certain popular blogger who lost her entire blog, together with a large part of her identity. The same can happen to us, just as for others or for an entire nation, when we lose our photos, blog posts, documents and videos – digital records of our identity.

It is the purpose the H6662 Digital Preservation course to familiarize us with the issues highlighted above and potential solutions to address such risks. We shall learn from the knowledge painstakingly accumulated by national culture institutions and partners who have developed programs for digital preservation around the world. Such knowledge can even be applied at the personal level – e.g., one can visit a Library of Congress portalet (at http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/you/) for some tips on “Personal Archiving”. In the course, you will get a chance to apply what you have learned in a case study that may concern you or your community. Collaboration and participation will be highly emphasized in this course – even in reading the literature by having reading wikis. We also encourage leveraging on work done by past students so that current students can really focus on achieving tangible results in the course, both conceptually and experientially.

New Course on Communities of Practice

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We welcome Mr Gopinathan as a part-time lecturer for Semester 2, AY2009-2010.

Mr Gopi is a Principal Consultant (KM) with the Civil Service College (CSC). He has developed and delivered KM training workshops for the CSC, and has co-facilitated workshops on Communities of Practice (CoP) with Dr Etienne Wenger, a globally recognised thought leader in the field of CoP. Mr Gopi has helped to launch a few CoPs in Singapore and has recently completed a study on CoP adoption among organisations in the Singapore Public Service. He is also experienced in developing and implementing information and KM systems for Private and Public Service organisations. His recent achievements include the development of a KM roadmap for the Singapore Public Service. A speaker at several KM conferences and seminars, Mr Gopi is often called upon as a resource person for KM within the Singapore Public Service.

This semester, Mr Gopi is teaching a new course K6233 Communities of Practice. This is what Mr Gopi says about the course:

Leading organizations in the private and public sectors have discovered that Communities of Practice (CoPs) are the ideal vehicle for engaging practitioners directly in the development of strategic capabilities. These leading organizations are finding that there is much they can do to cultivate communities intentionally and integrate them in the organization. But they have also learnt the importance of doing so in a way that honors the integrity of communities as structures of personal engagement, in which practitioners connect their sense of professional identity with strategic aspirations. In the 21st century, successful organizations will be the ones that achieve such a productive integration of the formal and the informal. This is the new challenge of the knowledge economy.

This course aims to equip students with the knowledge and competencies for cultivating CoPs in organizations. Topics include basic concepts and models of community elements, types and lifecycle of CoP, review design principles, success factors and organizational factors, and community-building techniques. Students will engage in case studies, gain practical experience in selected knowledge sharing techniques and in preparing for the launch of pilot communites, walk through various dimensions of the design of pilot CoPs and outline a launch process for the CoPs.

Dr Ou Shiyan appointed Professor at Nanjing University

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Congratulations to Dr Ou Shiyan on her appointment as Professor at Nanjing University, Dept of Information Management. Dr Ou obtained her PhD at NTU Wee Kim Wee School in 2006. Her thesis was on “Automatic Multidocument Summarization Using a Variable-Based Framework”. She then took a position as a post-doctoral research fellow at the U. of Wolverhampton, Computational Linguistics Research Group. She talks about her life after NTU:

Chris has asked me to write something for the DIS blog. I have delayed too much. 🙂 I will talk briefly about my life in Singapore and afterwards in the UK.

I am a former PhD student in DIS from 2001 to 2005 under the supervision of Dr. Chris Khoo. Chris is a very nice and patient supervisor, but also very strict with me. 🙂 During my study, other DIS faculty, Dr. Dion (my co-supervisor), Dr. Schubert, Dr. Yin Leng, Dr. Abdus, and Dr. Na, also gave me much help and encouragement.

After my PhD, I went to England and worked in the Computational Linguistics Research Group at the University of Wolverhampton, as a post-doctoral research fellow. Professor Ruslan Mitkov (http://pers-www.wlv.ac.uk/~le1825/) is the director of this group. Wolverhampton is a small city, located in the middle of England. It takes about 30 minutes by train or tram from Wolverhampton to Birmingham, the second biggest city in England. Wolverhampton has a famous football team in the English Premier League, called Wolves, which has a more than 100 year history. Britain is a very beautiful country, with lots of cultural heritage. I visited several nice cities and towns, such as London, Cambridge, Oxford, Bath, and Edinburg.

At the University of Wolverhampton, I mainly participated in an EU-funded project QALL-ME (http://qallme.fbk.eu/). The main goal of this project is to develop a multilingual and multimodal question-answering system with the help of semantic web technologies. This project has seven partners from four EU countries – Italy, Germany, Spain and UK. Every four months, we had a project meeting in the location of one of the partners. So I had the chance to visit some nice EU cities, such as Saarbrucken in Germany, Milan, Venice, and Trento in Italy.

In the EU, universities and research institutes have close relations. We often had visitors from France, Spain, Belgium and other countries, who presented their research and communicated with us. Some visitors are well-known in their fields, such as Eduard Hovy. When I read their papers as a PhD student, I did not imagine I would have the opportunity to meet them some day in person!

Currently I have completed my work in the UK and gone back to China. I have joined the Department of Information Management at Nanjing University (http://www.nju.edu.cn). I will introduce my life in China in a later post.

Hope all students and staff in the DIS have a wonderful New Year! I hope to visit you in Singapore again.

— Ou Shiyan

Scottish Bagpipe

Shiyan at Shakespeare's Hometown

Shiyan at Nanjing U.

International Night & Alumni Reunion 2009

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This year, International Night was expanded to an alumni reunion, and was held at the gorgeous ADM Auditorium (at the School of Art, Media & Design). The event, MCed by PhD student Kokil Jaidka, was attended about 250 students and alumni, and their family and friends.

More pictures at: http://islab2.sci.ntu.edu.sg/WSCI%20International%20Night/2009/

The programme:

1. Candle Light Dance (Myanmar Traditional Dance)

Performers: Hnin Wityee (Info Sys), Thuzar (Info Sys), Myint Malar San (Info Sys), Nwe Ni Myint Oo (Info Sys), San San Win (Info Studies), Thinzar Myo Myint (Knowledge Management), Cho Mar Win (Digital Media Technology), Htay Htay Khaing (Info Sys), Su Myat Min (Info Sys), Lai Lai Khaing (Info Sys), Phyu Phyu Thae (Info Sys), Nang Theingi Win (Info Sys)

Watch it on YouTube!