Spring 2024 Faculty Highlights

Dr. Kun Lu attended the 38th Annual Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference on Artificial Intelligence in February 2024 in Vancouver, Canada. Dr. Lu co-authored a research paper titled "Dependency Structure-Enhanced Graph Attention Networks for Event Detection." Event detection is an essential and challenging task of information extraction. Its target is to identify events and their types from text, including information about "Who did What to Whom and Where and When." The work proposed a dependency structure-enhanced event detection framework. The enhanced dependency structure allows the embedding representations of dependency relations to be updated as nodes rather than edges in a graph neural network. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the method, and the results confirm its superiority over the state-of-the-art base-lines. 

The AAAI conference is a highly regarded conference on Artificial Intelligence and is competitive, with an acceptance rate of 23.75% this year. 

Dr. June Abbas and her research team (Chie Noyori-Corbett - Zarrow School of Social Work, Jiening Ruan - College of Education, and doctoral student Xue Pan) presented their research from an IMLS funded grant (Refugee Services in US Public Libraries) at this year's Oklahoma Library Association conference. The session, entitled "Providing Library Services to Refugees in U.S. Public Libraries," discussed the results of a national survey of U.S. public librarians about the current programs and services libraries provide to refugees, and libraries' use of trauma-informed care practices. Attendees engaged in small group activities focused on challenges and barriers to providing services and how to implement trauma-informed programming and other related practices for refugees in their library.

Ph.D. student Ben Wang, and his faculty advisor Dr. Jiqun Liu, presented a poster about Human-AI Interaction at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR).  This work was a collaboration with University of Oklahoma Computer Science undergraduate students, Jamshed Karimnazarov and Nicholas Thompson.

Their findings of a user study demonstrate that the supportive functions help users manage expectations, reduce cognitive loads, better refine prompts, and increase user engagement. This research enhances the comprehension of designing proactive and user-centric systems with Large Language Models (LLM). It offers insights into evaluating human-LLM interactions and emphasizes potential challenges for under-served users.

On November 15, 2023, Dr. June Abbas presented an invited lecture at the National Institute of Library and Information Sciences at the University of Colombo International Research Symposium. The title of her talk was "LIS Research as Impact: Snapshot from a Scholar’s and Editor’s Perspective." Dr. Abbas presented the current research trends in library and information science through the lens of the research journal for which she is Editor-in-Chief, Library and Information Science Research. While focusing on the outcomes of LIS research, Dr. Abbas also invited the audience to consider LIS Research as:

• Interdisciplinary and uses methods from many disciplines to explore social problems 

• Human-centered and complex

• International, taking into account cultural context

• Actionable, intentional in design

• Impactful

• Inspiring

Watch the recorded presentation

A copy of the slides is available upon request.

Dr. Buffy Edwards has been elected to EPD executive board for 2024. Edwards has served as the SLIS Faculty Representative to the EPD Council since 2018. The Executive Committee for EPD Council determines the agenda for EPD Council meetings, to appraise and make recommendations to EPD Council on changes in certification programs, and other policy and procedural matters as part of the EPD Council. 

The Education Professions Division (EPD Council) is a university administrative structure that includes faculty, students, and staff who work directly and indirectly with professional education programs. Teacher education and school service personnel certification programs are governed through the EPD Council. The head is the director of teacher education, Dr. Aiyana Henry, who delegates responsibility for its operation to the associate dean for professional education.

On behalf of the research team with Dr. June Abbas and two doctoral students, Moses Munyao and Nazmin Sultana, Dr. Yong Ju Jung shared their work titled, Disabilities Empowering Tinkering: Stories of Learners with Disabilities at Library Makerspaces.

Dr. Jung also made a presentation about a project with Sabrina Denmon (an MLIS graduate, incoming PhD student) about children's data literacy through place-based embodied learning at a public library.

AERA is the largest conference in educational research as they reported there were 15,178 attendees this year. OU SLIS contributed to some great academic conversations regarding learning in libraries at this significant conference.

At the faculty awards banquet, held in April, Dr. Susan Burke was recognized for 20 years of service to OU.  Congratulations! Dr. Burke, and thank you for your dedication.

Watch the Ceremony

Drs. DH Monobe (SLIS), Bobbie Long (Emporia State University), and Michele Villagran's (San Jose State University) study on "Social Services, Law, and Crisis Management Curriculum Offered in Library and Information Studies" was recently published in the Journal of Education for Library and Information Science Education (JELIS). 

This study aimed to examine the trends in American Library Association (ALA)-accredited library and information studies (LIS) master's program course offerings that facilitated societal interactions and support, specifically social services, law, soft skills, and crisis management. Overall, courses that facilitated societal interactions and support were seen as important and should continue to be offered. Moreover, to enhance such courses, collaboration with faculty in other programs was recommended.

Dr. June Abbas (Co-PI), along with Qiong Wang (PI-Price College of Business), Heyjie Jung (Co-PI), Political Science; Jeong-Nam Kim (Co-PI), Public Relations; Ted Matherly (Co-PI), Marketing; Sunha Yeo (Co-PI), DaLI Lab recently was awarded two internal OU grants to investigate the critical social issue of misinformation and negative sentiment about immigrants to the United States. The awards are from OU's Institute for Community and Society Transformation (ICAST) and Data Institute for Societal Challenges. The research projects will use a combination of social media scraping techniques, qualitative interviews, social network and sentiment analysis, among other methods to explore the relationship between anti-immigration stigma and immigrants’ economic integration within host communities.

Dr. Kim, with Dr. Noyori-Corbett as co-PI, along with members from Professional and Continuing Studies (Dr. Alavi-Robb) and Social Work (Cannon and Kratz), has received a grant from the Network of the National Library of Medicine (NNLM), a branch of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to address mental health misconceptions among Afghan refugee women, especially considering the prevalent stigma surrounding mental health in Afghanistan.

By assessing the understanding of mental health among this demographic both before and after training, they are not only shedding light on the current state of awareness but also potentially paving the way for improved well-being of Afghan women's mental health and contributing to broader efforts in destigmatizing mental health issues