Syracuse iSchool welcomes two new faculty members
7/7/2009
The Syracuse University School of Information Studies is pleased to announce the appointment of two new faculty members, Jun Wang and Bei Yu. The married couple will officially join the iSchool in the fall. Wang will be a part of the research faculty while Yu, a tenure-track assistant professor, will be teaching courses on database management and information system design starting in spring 2010.
Jun Wang 
Wang, a postdoctoral fellow from Northwestern University, comes to the iSchool with a wide array of research interests ranging from intelligent computing and digital libraries to information visualization and computational neuroscience. His current research focuses on socially intelligent computing, specifically social tagging games. Wang studies how to design web applications to harness the collective wisdom of the vast Internet population through this method of categorizing data.
“Social tagging is becoming an important way to annotate, organize, and share information and knowledge,” Wang said. “The power of social tagging lies in its social effect of collective wisdom: the more devoted the participants, the more effective the tagging systems. My work is to study how to design tagging games or tools to maximize the user adoption and thus unlock the power of social tagging to its full potential.”
Wang is also interested in designing novel visualization tools to aid collaborative exploration and interpretation of various statistical data.
Wang was a recipient of the Natural Science Foundation of China Award in 1999. He is also the creator of the world’s most comprehensive online bibliography on language evolution and computation, Language Evolution and Computation Portal.
Wang is also the co-author of Citation-kNN, a machine learning algorithm that has been integrated into four open-source data mining software packages, including the award-winning software Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis (WEKA).
Wang holds a Ph.D. in library and information science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He earned a Ph.D. in computer science from the Institute of Computing Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in China as well as an M.E. in computer science from Wuhan University in China.
Bei Yu 
Yu comes to the iSchool with a focus in the areas of information retrieval, machine learning, and natural language processing. Her research interests also include developing text mining methods, especially emotion and opinion analysis approaches, to support data-driven scholarship in humanities and social science research.
“The increasing availability of large amounts of text data opens up new research challenges and opportunities in social sciences and humanities,” Yu said. “Language-processing methodologies are critical to facilitate the exploration of large text collections.”
While completing a Ph.D. and post-doctoral research, Yu has collaborated with literary scholars, political scientists, and business analysts on various interdisciplinary projects. Her research has led to a number of publications in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings.
Before joining the iSchool, Yu worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Ford Motor Company Center for Global Citizenship at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. She was also a co-instructor for the proseminar in semantics in the Department of Linguistics at Northwestern University and has served as a guest lecturer at both Northwestern and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
She said she is eager to use these experiences in her work as an assistant professor at Syracuse University.
“I have always wanted to work with a research team like the one in the Syracuse iSchool,” Yu said. “During my campus visit, I was deeply impressed with the amount of support the school offers to junior faculty members. I believe this is the best place to start my academic career.”
Yu holds a Ph.D. in library and information science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She also earned a M.S. in computer science at the Institute of Computing Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in China.
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