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The current bevy of "career workshop" presenters at the School of Informatics here have become a bit repetitive -- largely presenters by local businesses looking for programmers or technically oriented business people, combined with some looking for technical consultancy types. Non-"career workshop" presenters have been almost uniformly presenting high level research and broad visionary stuff.
I'm looking to get some presenters that are a bit different. Right now I'm building some contacts, and I'm aiming high -- the IMF, WTO, World Bank, OCHA, UNITAR, and others (hey, contact enough of them and at least one or two'll send a speaker, particularly if I can swing airfare and honorarium, which is likely).
Oh, and ATSIP.
I recalled your presidency thereof, and after doing some digging on the site think that a speaker from your group, if such a thing is possible, would give an excellent presentation to students in the field of Informatics ( http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/overview/what_is_informatics.asp ).
Not necessarily a talk overly concerned with technical details, either, but one concerned with how information and technology are applied to traffic safety, perhaps speaking in particular on current information management practices, their strengths and weaknesses, possible future practices, developing traffic safety technology and how it has been shaped by our understanding of traffic safety information, or any one of a number of things.
I'm posting this on the forum because then it also serves as a blatant ploy to get members of other organizations particularly concerned with information and technology in our lives to speak up so I can pester them about possibly sending a speaker.
Oh, and the location is Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. This would be for the spring speaking series (though groups that couldn't come for spring would be kept in mind for the future), and as I said, I can likely swing airfare and a decent honorarium.
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Oh, and you can also think of this as an opportunity to recruit future Traffic Safety Information Professionals from the best Informatics school in the country.
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posted
I don't have direct contacts any more, but there's a lot of interesting work in bioinformatics. I was working with various ontologies for describing cancer diagnoses, therapies, and clinical trials (here's a sample).
I bet there are contacts in the linked page you could use, although none of them know me any more.
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Actually, its sort of odd we don't have many presentations on that sort of thing. The school's getting huge sums of grant money to come up with some of those methods (my professor is getting millions from Lilly for working with DNA annotation methods, for instance).
I think part of its the disconnect between grad/research and undergrad that happens so much. I'll try to swing a couple of speakers along those lines, too, though likely all I'll need to do is mention something to the faculty and they'll have some friends they can grab.
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Ooh, your posting gives me an idea, though. I know there are a number of places out there that deal with the vast sums of information lawyers need to wade through. Do you think a presenter from someplace like LexisNexis would be worthwhile? Can you think of some other company/organization that would be interesting to have a presenter from in that field?
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It's a great information project: unstructured text produced mainly by people who will not cooperate with a system designer (judges). It's searched by full text methods as well as human-coded categories/summarizations. There's a highly relational model as well as a much more unstructured set of information, all contained in the same system.
It would be very interesting.
Edit: The other one to get would be Westlaw, from West publishing. These are the two giants, and both are used widely.
There's also the possibility of getting someone who designed a court system-very different, since it's more of a task & document management system. The federal courts use something called PACER and CM/ECF.
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Fugu! I can guarantee that ATSIP will send someone. I would love to do it myself, but if there ends up being a schedule conflict or you all decide you'd rather have a person from government (rather than private sector consulting), that'd be fine too. We can supply a great speaker for you regardless.
The travel and honorarium would be necessary unless it's someone from relatively close by (within a few hours drive max) because it'd either be someone (like myself) who would have to cover the hours with their employer, or it'd be someone from government who, most likely, would be using their personal day off to come and address your group.
This is excellent though. Please send me more info at bscopatz at data-nexus.com -- I have an ATSIP board meeting coming up and I will add this to the agenda.
Also, if you think this is a decent recruitment opportunity, I believe the need for information technology savvy professionals in all phases of traffic safety is strong and long term.
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