The Information Quality Graduate Program at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock will host two prestigious international conferences on information and data quality in November, 2013. The first is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) International Conference on Information Quality (ICIQ) that will return to the UALR campus November 7-9, 2013. UALR also hosted the ICIQ in 2010, a conference that attracted more than 140 information and data quality professionals from all over the world, including Australia, China, India, Germany, France, United Kingdom, Spain, Portugal, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, and Finland. Attendance at the 2013 ICIQ is expected to be even greater.
Established in 1995 by Dr. Richard Wang, Director of the MIT IQ Program and co-founder of the UALR IQ Graduate Program, the ICIQ is the longest-running, annual international IQ conference. Starting in 2009, the ICIQ moved from the MIT campus to a series of international locations that have been centers of influence in the IQ research and practice community, including the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) in Potsdam, Germany in 2009; the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, USA, in 2010, the University of South Australia, Adelaide, in 2011; Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM) in Paris, France in 2012, and returning to UALR in 2013.
The second conference hosted at UALR in 2013 will be the annual Information and Data Quality Conference organized by the International Association for Information and Data Quality (IAIDQ). This event will be November 4-7, 2013, immediately followed by the ICIQ. Chartered in 2004, the IAIDQ is the only international professional organization devoted entirely to information and data quality. The IAIDQ held its first Information and Data Quality Conference in 2006 in San Francisco, California, and for the past two years it has been held as a joint Data Governance and Information Quality (DGIQ) conference in San Diego, California.
The UALR Information Quality Graduate Program has close ties with the MIT IQ Program and the IAIDQ. Dr. John R. Talburt, Coordinator for the UALR IQ Graduate Program, also serves on the Board for the MIT ICIQ and is also an advisor to the IAIDQ Board of Directors. In 2008, Dr. Elizabeth Pierce and MS student Wendell Scott Dismute partnered with IAIDQ advisor C. Lwanga Yonke to develop an industry research report on the state of data governance, and in 2009, Dr. Pierce and MS student Apolonia Lintag with Lwanga Yonke developed an industry research report on IQ salaries and job satisfaction. Dr. Pierce, MS student Chitra Nagaraj, Lwanga Yonke, and IAIDQ Board Member Piyush Malik are developing a third report on the state of information and data quality that is scheduled to be published later this year.
UALR also has the only Student Chapter among the IAIDQ sponsored Communities of Practice (COP). In addition, several UALR graduates and faculty contributed to the development of the Information Quality Certified Professional (IQCP) credential, which was first offered to IQ professionals worldwide in June, 2011. Of the 44 individuals who current hold the IQCP, two are UALR faculty members and nine are students or graduates of the UALR IQ program.
