Students, graduates, and faculty of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock Information Quality Graduate Program made a strong showing at the 20th Anniversary Celebration of the MIT International Conference on Information Quality (ICIQ-2015) held on the MIT campus in Cambridge, MA, on July 24, 2015. The keynote speakers for the anniversary event were Jeff Jonas, Chief Scientist of Context Computing, IBM Corporation, and John Zachman, CEO of Zachman International.
The ICIQ conference is sponsored by the MIT Information Quality Program led by Dr. Richard Wang, who is an affiliate faculty member and co-founder of the UALR IQ program. In addition, the ICIQ-2015 Conference Chair was Dr. Elizabeth Pierce, Chair of the UALR Information Science Department.
Other participants included Mohammed Ahmed, student and webmaster for the UALR Student Chapter of the International Association for Information and Data Quality (IAIDQ); Dr. Christopher Heien, 2012 PhD graduate from Cigna Corporation, Bloomfield, CT; Dr. Fumiko Kobayashi, 2015 PhD graduate and invited presenter for the paper “Confidence Rating for Interactive Identity Resolution”; Dr. Cheng Chen, 2015 PhD graduate and invited presenter for the paper “A Visualization System to Support Clerical Review, Correction, and Confirmation Assertions in Entity Identity Information”; Dr. Harry Zhu, UALR IQ Affiliate Faculty member from the University of Massachusetts, Lowell; Dr. Isaac Osesina, UALR IQ Affiliate Faculty member from Aware, Inc., Bedford, MA; Khizer Syed, 2014 MSIQ Graduate from Equifax, Inc., Atlanta, GA; Dr. Meredith Zozus, UALR IQ Affiliate Faculty member from Duke University, Durham, NC; Nihal Muhammad, UALR IQ student; Dr. Tom Redman, UALR Affiliate Faculty member from Navesink Consulting Group, Rumson, NJ; Dr. Arun Sundararaman, UALR Affiliate Faculty member from Accenture, Chennai, India; and Dr. John R. Talburt, UALR IQ Graduate Coordinator and invited presenter for the session “Entity Resolution Research and Opportunities”.
Other students who were co-authors of papers presented at the conference, but were unable to attend include Debanjan Mahata, primary author of the paper “A Framework for Collecting, Extracting and Managing Event Identity Information from Twitter” presented at the conference by co-author, Dr. Talburt; Daniel Pullen, co-author of the paper “A Visualization System to Support Clerical Review, Correction, and Confirmation Assertions in Entity Identity Information”; Theresa Williams, primary author of the paper “Measuring Sociocultural Factors of Success in Information Quality Projects” presented at the conference by co-author David Becker from Mitre Corporation; and Carmen Robinson, co-author of the same paper.
The 2016 ICIQ is scheduled for June 22-23, 2016 in Ciudad Real, Spain. The 2017 ICIQ will return to Little Rock, AR, USA, for the third time. The UALR IQ program has hosted the ICIQ in 2010 and 2013. For more information on the ICIQ conferences visit the ICIQ.global website.
The Information Quality Graduate program was established in 2006 by the UALR Donaghey College of Engineering and Information Technology (EIT) in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Information Quality (MIT IQ) Program. The program is designed to prepare IQ students to meet real-world IQ challenges and to promote the quality of research. The program offers a world-class curriculum and unmatched academic advising and guidance by internationally recognized faculty. The program offers three degrees – PhD, MS, and Certificate that are offered both on the Little Rock campus and online.
