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SIG-AI Officer Election

SIG AI is pleased to announce voting is now open for the newly founded SIG-AI officer cabinet. The nominees are as follows:

Chair:

 

Chirag Shah
Associate Professor, University of Washington

http://chiragshah.org

Over many decades, we have seen what AI could do, but it's only recently we have started asking what AI should do. I have been fortunate to be a part of both of these revolutions and revelations -- first as a student and a scholar who built intelligent systems, and now as a mentor and an advocate who is trying to educate the world about the issues of bias, fairness, and accountability in AI. I have been a leader in this area not just in academia, but also working with several tech companies in understanding how AI systems can integrate human values in their design and deployment. I have published papers and given talks, taught tutorials, and advised students, scholars, and practitioners in this space. I am often interviewed by media sources as an expert to comment on search engine bias, fairness in machine learning, and Responsible AI in general. I have received funding from NSF to bring transparency to AI systems. I am co-leading a group on Responsible AI at University of Washington. My scholarly outcomes and public advocacy passion, coupled with my leadership record in ASIST and other organizations makes me a highly suitable candidate for this position.

I have been investigating issues of bias and fairness in search and recommender systems. I am interested in identifying how various forms of biases trickle in such systems and the ways we could mitigate them. Specifically, I care about addressing information representation and access issues for underrepresented groups. In addition, I am also interested in finding ways to create and present explanations for black-box AI systems. In broad terms, my research involves creating value-sensitive intelligent systems and experiences.


Xiaozhong Liu
Indiana University Bloomington

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1F6P55QjS5qxpCAhcQi7g7i97iMnJ0mca/view

I have a track record of both academic and industrial research in the fields of data science, machine/deep learning, computational social science, natural language processing (NLP), AI fairness/trustworthiness, cybersecurity and graph mining. As a data science faculty, I clearly understand advances in exploring the valuable information and knowledge from various kinds of data, developing novel AI models, distilling actionable insights from large corpuses, and build AI-enabled decision-making systems. Currently, according to CSrankings.org, I am ranked as the most productive AI and Machine Learning  faculty at Indiana University. Meanwhile, my algorithm APIs are used more than 170 million times per day, and they outperform existing methods by 10% on the average.


Communications Officer

Abid Hussain
Library Officer

https://abidmardan.wixsite.com/abidmardan

I have good personal and interpersonal communication skills and surfing internet for last 15 years. I am running two successive pages of Facebook named Library jobs and Research Method skills. I am social activist and participating in different functions held in Pakistan and international online.


Edger Mtitu
Librarian Trainee - The Institute of Finance Management (IFM)

https://tz.linkedin.com/in/edger-mtitu-19763a8b

I, Edger Mtitu, a Librarian Trainee at the Institute of Finance Management (IFM) in Tanzania hereby acknowledge my interest and motivation to ASIS&T SIG AI (Artificial Intelligence) Call for Nominations for Officers (2021-2022) as a Communications Officer. My professional competence is based on; Library Management Systems particularly the Koha Integrated Management System, Dspace, Calibre E-books Management System, Graphics Design and management of social medias.

However as a Librarian Trainee, I successful managed library social medias for three years such as website, blog, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter for my former employer library (Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences (MUHAS) and now I am doing the same at my current working institutions. Not only that but also I have been conducting trainings to librarians in my country to let them be abreast with the current trends in LIS including the use and application of web 2.0 technologies, I also have been providing consultancies in Library automation using KOHA ILMS and designing repositories using Dspace software.

Moreover, the ASIS&T is one of my preferences toward making my own contributions as a Communications Officer and competence in this position is doubtless by guaranteed with the information professional knowledge and skills I have, strong interpersonal skills and working experience I have in the field, I believe I could be a useful asset to our ASIS&T and be a part of the seed nourishing our association productivity.


Lala Hajibayova
Associate Professor, Kent State University School of Information

https://www.kent.edu/iSchool/lala-hajibayova-phd

AI is one my research areas, and I've been conducting research related to perception of AI in information representation and discovery as well as ethical application of AI in knowledge representation, organization and discovery systems (Hajibayova, 2019; 2020). I have previous served in a capacity of treasurer and chair of SIG CR, and I believe I have sufficient experience to contribute to SIG AI. I also have experience of collaborating with a various groups to run pre-conference workshops. I believe I can meaningfully contribute to development of SIG AI.


Treasurer 

Noora Hirvonen
Assistant professor (AI literacies), University of Oulu, Finland

https://www.oulu.fi/university/researcher/noora-hirvonen

I would be very happy to take an officer position in the AI special interest group and that way support the emerging research on AI-related themes within information science.

I am currently working as an assistant professor focusing on AI literacies and involved in cross-disciplinary activities within this area of research. I think the main value of this SIG is that it can offer a possibility for people with an interest in AI to connect with others sharing the same field of research. I believe that information science research can have a unique contribution to understanding the opportunities and challenges of AI in different areas of society, and I would be glad to support that research as a SIG officer.

I have some experience as an ASIS&T officer already and since 2019, I have acted as the Treasurer for ASIS&T's European Chapter but I would also be fine with the Communications Officer position.