Last semester, School of Information professor Dr. Besiki Stvilia traveled to London to attend and present at the 86th Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T). Dr. Stvilia has attended many of these meetings before and always welcomes the opportunity to stay updated on developments in his research areas and connect with both potential and past collaborators.

While at the conference, Dr. Besiki presented two papers. The first paper “Exploring Applications and User Experience with Generative AI Tools: A Content Analysis of Reddit Posts on ChatGPT” reported on a collaborative study of Generative Artificial Intelligence applications with a focus on ChatGPT. This project was a collaboration between Dr. Stvilia, iSchool alumnus and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee assistant professor Dr. Wonchan Choi, and University of Texas at Austin associate professor Dr. Yan Zhang.

Dr. Stvilia also presented the poster paper “Toward the Conceptualization of Data Quality Assurance in Research Data Repositories” in collaboration with iSchool alumnus and Texas A&M University associate professor Dr. Dong Joon Lee, doctoral students Yuanying Pang and Fatih Gunaydinand, and iSchool MSIT program alumni Faizan Ali and Karthik Gonthina. The poster paper reported on the preliminary findings of a larger study examining data quality assurance (DQA) practices in research data repositories (RDRs) with the goal of developing a high-level DQA conceptual model that can be used to guide the design and evaluation of DQA workflows in RDRs.

On his overall experience at the conference, Dr. Stvilia shared, “I have attended ASIS&T annual meetings since 1997 but missed the four to five meetings preceding this year’s event. It was wonderful to see colleagues and friends in London after such a long time.”