Dr. Rolf Wigand, Chair of the Donald Ballou & Harold Pazer Information Quality Dissertation Award Committee, announced three winners for the 2012 competition. Dr. Mohamed Yakout from Purdue University was awarded First Place for his dissertation “Guided Data Cleaning”. This year two graduates from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock Information Quality Graduate Program tied for second place, Dr. Ahmed Abu-Halimeh for “Integrating Information Quality in Visual Analytics” and Dr. Yinle Zhou for “Modeling and Design of Entity Identity Information in Entity Resolution Systems”. Dr. Yakout’s dissertation advisor was Professor Ahmed K. Elmagarmid, Dr. Abu-Halimeh’s advisor was Professor Mihail Tudoreanu, and Dr. Zhou’s advisor was Professor John R. Talburt.
The Ballou-Pazer Competition and Award was instituted at the 2007 International Conference on Information Quality (ICIQ) in honor of Professors Emeritae Donald Ballou, University at Albany School of Business, and Harold Pazer, Washington State University, to honor their ground breaking work to investigate information quality from the information system perspective. The Ballou-Pzaer Award recognizes the dissertations that demonstrate the most significant contributions to the information quality field within the two calendar years prior to the annual International Conference on Information Quality. This year’s awards will be given at the ICIQ in Paris, France, November 15-17, 2012.
Past winners of the award include:
| Year | Author | Organization | Title |
| 2011 | Gregory Hill | University of Melbourne, Australia | A Framework for Valuing the Quality of Customer Information |
| Isaac Osesina | University of Arkansas at Little Rock | A Data-Intensive Approach to Named Entity Recognition Using Domain and Language Independent Methods | |
| 2010 | Greg Holland | University of Arkansas at Little Rock | Knowledge-Driven Identity Resolution for Longitudinal Education Data |
| Neal Gibson | University of Arkansas at Little Rock | Improving information products for System 2 decision support | |
| 2009 | Paolo Missier | University of Manchester | Modelling and Computing Information Quality in e-science |
| 2008 | John O’Donoghue | University of College Cork | Context-Sensitive Quality Data Management for Pervasive Computing Environments |
| Shirlee-ann Knight | Edith Cowan University | User Perceptions of Information Quality in World Wide Web Information Retrieval Behaviour |
Members of the Award Committee include Dr. Rolf Wigand (Chair), University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Dr. Markus Helfert, Dublin City University, Dr. Yang Lee, Northeastern University, Dr. Stuart Madnick, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dr. Felix Naumann, Hasso Plattner Institut, and Dr. Richard Wang, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
