School of Information Studies PhD students Rhiannon Gainor & Qing Zou win Information System Design Competition

Congratulations to McGill School of Information Studies doctoral candidates Rhiannon Gainor and Qing Zou, whose team won the annual Information System Design Competition at the 2013 Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) conference! This year's challenge, organized by Professor Candy Schwartz of Simmons College, was to develop a preliminary design of a system that uses a researcher’s personal collection and online persona to enhance discovery in large databases.

Their winning proposal was for a system design that combines a recommendation algorithm for learning the researcher's online persona and personal collection, and a relevance ranking algorithm for bringing disparate information elements together in a way that could be controlled by the end user for building and tailoring not only external database searches, but also  internal searching of the user’s own computer. This, combined with an interface design that addressed personal information management issues, allowed them to edge away from some strong competition.

Winners of the competition receive free conference registration to the ASIS&T Annual Meeting in 2014.

Photo L-R: Rhiannon Gainor, competition organizer Professor Candy Schwartz of Simmons College, Qing Zou, and Yusuf Abdullahi Abiodun of Tshwane South College for FET (South Africa). Missing: Zhen Yue, University of Pittsburgh. Image Credit: Yusuf Abdullahi Abiodun, Tshwane South College for FET (South Africa).