Teaching and Learning

Enrollments and Degrees:

• School of Informatics (SOI) enrollments for 2007 were up 10 percent over 2006-2007.
• The School awarded three certificates, 72 BS degrees, and 36 MS degrees.  
  

Curriculum Innovation:

• A comprehensive revision of the graduate curriculum in the Media Arts and Science (MAS) program has been completed and will be implemented in the fall of 2008.
• An online Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Graduate Certificate Program went live in the spring of 2008.
• A new Ph.D. Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) track begins in the fall of 2008.

Teaching Innovation:

• In Spring 2008, SOI offered its first 12-week course and its first Friday course. Other course formats include hybrid courses taught in both synchronous and asynchronous modes, one-week intensives, Saturday portfolio classes, and learning communities.

• Darrell Bailey taught an experimental course at Sun Yat-sen University.  The course spanned 12 time zones, four countries, and three continents.

• Jake Chen was selected as primary teacher of a bioinformatics training program in China. The workshop was offered in June 2008 by the International Bioinformatics Workshop (IBW) at Yunnan University in Kunming, China.
  

Student Learning:

• Christopher Hardin, SOI senior, was selected by IUPUI as Top Male Student for 2008.
• Leon Nowlin, Jr., MAS senior, was the recipient of the SOI 2008 IUPUI Chancellor’s Scholar Award.
• Five undergraduate students were among the Top 100 outstanding academic performers on the IUPUI campus.
• Frank Tai, MAS graduate 2008, was given a residency with Pixar Animation Studios.  He will assist with the production of Toy Story 3. 
• HCI master’s student Sandosh Vasudevan completed a successful internship at Yahoo and passed up employment with the search engine company to finish his degree in Informatics. He has launched a start-up company in Indianapolis and has also created software for used by Apple, Firefox, and social networking sites.
• Leana Kruska, senior MAS student, received a summer Smithsonian Institution internship in electronic imaging with the Office of Photographic Services.

Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

Signature Center Activity:

• Jake Chen is director of The Indiana Center for Systems Biology and Personalized Medicine, which will encourage translational research that brings new discoveries in biology to clinical applications.
• Karl MacDorman will head the Android Science Center, the first laboratory of its kind in the United States, where scientists will build and test more functional and realistic androids and explore human-android interactions.
• Anthony Faiola is a co-principal investigator for the TASI Signature Center in the School of Engineering & Technology.
  

Major Grant Activity:

• External contract and grant expenditures for the School of Informatics totaled $1,177,996 as of June 30, 2008.
• Yaoqi Zhou received a four-year $1.1M National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant for his research on "Statistical Energy Functions: a Fragment-based Approach.”
• Mathew Palakal is PI on the SCANS project, part of a $1.9 million grant from Indiana's 21st Century Research and Technology Fund awarded to MyHealthCare, a local Indiana company, for care coordination, health assessment and education for geriatric patients.

• Malika Mahoui and Josette Jones are part of an NIH grant awarded to Logical Semantics, “Extracting Semantic Knowledge from Clinical Reports” for $852,683.  This research focuses on medical record text-mining to improve clinical health care.

• Edgar Huang received $15,000 from the U.S. District Court Southern District of Indiana Library Fund to produce a video about the cultural tradition and history of the courthouse and a training video for attorneys to learn courtroom technology in the courthouse.
  

Scholarship and Creative Activity:

• The second VisionFest, a juried student animation festival, was held August 16-18, 2007. The keynote speaker was Rick O’Connor, lead animator of Industrial Light and Magic.  The event received over 150 student entries from six countries representing 34 schools, colleges, and universities. (http://www.visionfest.org).
• Jake Chen co-edited Biological Database Modeling. It focuses on large-scale biological knowledge representations for the bio-computing community. (http://informatics.iupui.edu/news/story.php?id=658)
• Josette Jones co-edited 2008 Nursing Informatics, outlining professional standards in the emerging field of nursing informatics.
• Mathew Palakal serves on the Editorial Board of the International Journal on Datamining and Bioinformatics.

Civic Engagement

• Karl MacDorman, along with 2008 HCI alumna Chris Newlon, designed a mega-collaboration tool for disaster relief to address the needs of grassroots aid organizations such as the Peace Learning Center. 
• Darrell Bailey, Anna McDaniel, Dean James Brown (School of Journalism) and student Marcos Dominguez continued work with Operation Walk-Mooresville in Nicaragua February 3-9, 2008.

• Media Arts and Science students created a promotional DVD for national distribution to help the American Legion broaden its outreach.

• SOI hosted its first Adopt-A-Family at Christamore House in December 2007.

Diversity

• MAS students and faculty collaborated with the Madame Walker Foundation on several media projects exploring the history of Madame Walker and Indiana Avenue. MAS graduate student Michael Jefferson worked on a video documentary history of the Madame Walker Theater.  Along with a group of master’s students, faculty members Richard Edwards and Clint Koch are completing a full-scale immersive 3D virtual reality model of the theater for viewing in online virtual worlds and the IU Virtual Reality Theater.
• A new SOI Diversity Committee formed in the fall of 2007 and adopted a diversity plan for the school. Brown Bag lunches have been held with women faculty and staff to explore ways to recruit and retain women and minority students.
• Gloria Quiroz, undergraduate advisor, is serving as a member of the board of directors of La Plaza, a merger of FIESTA and El Centro Hispano, and as chair of the Norman Brown Diversity and Leadership Program.
• Sheila Morris-Watson, assistant director of student services and undergraduate advising, was the recipient of a grant from the Sam H. Jones Community Service Scholarship Program.  The grant enabled her to offer a scholarship to a student to serve as a Service Learning Assistant to the INFO-I100 First Year Experience/Learning Communities courses.
• SOI also funded three students through the Diversity Scholars Research Program at IUPUI.

Best Practices

• Fifteen Informatics courses and four Media Arts and Sciences courses are now offered online.  The school’s distance learning program began in 2004 with one class and an enrollment of seven students.   Total online enrollment for Spring 2008 was 354 students. Most courses offered via distributed education leverage innovative software, such as Adobe Acrobat Connect, the latest in streaming and webcast technologies, as well as a variety of capture and simulation methods designed to support innovative curriculum development. 
• Students now have the option to complete their course work (22 courses) for the Health Information Administration degree through a completely distributed environment.
• The multimedia team of Jennifer Stewart, Geoff Coryell, and David Phelps, under the direction of Andy Barth, has successfully captured, edited, hosted and posted IUPUI's Distinguished Lecture Series.  These lectures will be used by all H199 (Honors Seminar) students as a required part of their coursework.
• A new service from the SOI Career Services Office, called the “Don’t Cancel Class Policy Plan B,” started in 2007. Faculty who are ill or traveling can call upon  Career Services personnel to make  announcements, take attendance, and provide sessions on career coaching within the content area of their classes.

External Awards and Appointments

Karl MacDorman’s android research was featured in ScienceWatch.com as a “fast-breaking paper” in June 2008. These papers comprise the top one percent of papers in each field for each year.  Other publications in which his research was featured  included: Inside Indiana Business ,  IU Alumni ,  Across Indiana-WFYI Indianapolis, 3D World, NewScientist,  BBC News, The Indianapolis Star, and 30 other television, radio, newspaper, and Internet news outlets. He was also profiled as a Featured Translational Scholar by the IUPUI TRIP (Translating Research into Practice) initiative for his research with androids.
• Edgar Huang collaborated with Clifford C. Marsiglio of IUPUI’s Testing Center to develop a web site, Searching for An Ideal Streaming Media Technology, which won second place in the Creative Project Category in the “Best of the Web” Design Competition sponsored by Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.
•  Clint Koch was a recipient of the Who’s Who in America’s Distinguished Professor recognition; Karl MacDorman was a recipient of Who’s Who in the World (16th, 18th, 23rd ed.) recognition in Asia.
• Edgar Huang was promoted from Vice Head/Program Chair to Head in the Visual Communication Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.
• In 2008, Steve Hodges, an MAS alumnus, received: (1) Bronze Medal, CASE International Circle of Excellence Awards Program, Complete Institutional Web Site category, for the IUPUI campus web site; (2) Gold Award, Admissions Marketing Report 23rd Annual Admissions Advertising Awards, for the  IUPUI campus web site; (3) Bronze Award, Admissions Marketing Report 23rd Annual Admissions Advertising Awards, “The Spot” podcast; (4) Merit Award, Admissions Marketing Report 23rd Annual Admissions Advertising Awards, “Health & Life Sciences” podcast.