Visiting Scholars 2017
T
he iSchool hosted a number of visiting faculty members and doctoral scholars from a range of domestic and international institutions during the year. Guest scholars contributed research efforts, operational functions, course teaching, project proposals and expansion of the iSchool’s inter-school and inter-continental reach over the course of the year. MATTHEW ADIGUN Visiting faculty Faculty Sponsor: Lee McKnight Institution: University of Zululand and United Nations University Position: Senior Professor and Research Leader Country: South Africa Detail: Professors Adigun and McKnight have collaborated for several years. Adigun’s summer 2017 research visit involved further planning for their Syracuse UniversityUniversity of Zululand African national digital transformation project. The effort is expected to begin in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and in Liberia, with potential expansion to other African nations after a pilot phase. Adigun’s United Nations University research on edge-cloud computing in rural Africa is relevant to the project. Plans call for his students, along with students at other African universities and at Syracuse University, to contribute to the project research.
MAXIPHOTO/iSTOCKPHOTO BY GETTY IMAGES
innovatiONS 30
THE iSCHOOL @ SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY
CHARLES (CHRIS) HINNANT Visiting faculty Faculty Sponsor: Steven Sawyer Position: Associate Professor Country: USA Detail: Professors Hinnant and Sawyer pursued three projects. Two were research-oriented and focused on combining data on information sharing in public safety, and advancing a proposal idea around data sharing in the public sector. A third was instruction-oriented, involving updating and developing material for the iSchool’s course IST 614, Introduction to Managing Information Professionals. Hinnant, whose specialties are information management and policy, social and organizational informatics and public policy and management, led one of the course sections. AMIRA REZGUI Doctoral student, 2016-2017 Faculty Sponsor: Kevin Crowston Institution: Telecom Bretagne Country: Tunisia (LeBardo) in Northern Africa Detail: Amira Rezgui is a post-doctoral researcher who is working with Associate Dean for Research Crowston on his stigmergic coordination project. Her role is overseeing field tests of a new system. The research looks at coordination mediated by changes to a shared work product via stigmergy, as opposed to explicit or implicit coordination methods. It examines Wikipedia, as one of the most successful experiments in online collaborative knowledge building, for evidence of stigmergic coordination.
