2025 CIDS Online Student Research Conference

The College of Information, Data and Society (CIDS) is holding the 2025 Online Student Research Conference, March 4-6, 2025. The CIDS Conference connects students across the college and promotes student work, aiming to provide an opportunity for CIDS students to share their school or professional work, to communicate and connect with each other, and ultimately to foster a stronger sense of community among students. The 2025 Conference Committee Members are: Dr. José Aguiñaga, Dr. Mary Ann Harlan, Sarah Kudela, Dr. Guannan Liu, Dr. Vishnu Pendyala, Dr. Norm Mooradian (Co-chair), Dr. Virginia Tucker (Chair).

Student Presentations

Student presentations are pre-recorded videos, 5 to 7 minutes long, with captioning.  View the student presentations here.

Live Opening & Closing Keynote Sessions

Webinar link for both Keynote Sessions: https://sjsu.zoom.us/j/86962576183

Opening Session: March 4, 2025, 12:00-1:00 pm (Pacific)

    Keynote Speaker: Dr. Leo Lo

Title: “Thriving in an AI-Driven Professional Environment: Skills for Success in a Changing World”

Description: Discover how to harness the power of AI to enhance your career and research. Dr. Leo Lo will explore the essential skills needed to thrive in an AI-driven workplace, from leveraging AI tools for innovation to addressing ethical challenges. This session will empower you with practical strategies and insights to stay competitive, adaptable, and ahead of the curve in a rapidly evolving technological landscape.

Bio: Dr. Leo Lo is the Dean and Professor of the College of University Libraries & Learning Sciences at the University of New Mexico. A recognized leader in AI literacy and workforce development, Dr. Lo focuses on empowering library and higher education professionals through innovative training programs. As President of the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL), he spearheaded a national task force to develop comprehensive AI competencies. Dr. Lo studied Artificial Intelligence at the University of Oxford and holds a doctorate in Higher Education Management from the University of Pennsylvania, along with an MS in Information Studies from Florida State University.

Closing Session: March 6, 2025, 12:00-1:00 pm (Pacific)

    Keynote Speaker: Dr. Katherine D. Harris

Title: “Public Art Offers Digital Humanities a Chance to be Part of the Resistance”

Description: Public art lives all over downtown San Jose, a city in the San Francisco Bay Area that is arguably becoming the “heart” of Silicon Valley. The public art exists on the sides of buildings, within public courtyards, behind gates in the community garden, and out in the open at cross-streets. People walk by this public art often without giving it a second thought primarily because there’s no single space to tell their history – with almost all of them representing diverse communities of San Jose and their staunch resistance to Silicon Valley assimilation. A team of faculty and students from the College of Humanities & the Arts at San Jose State University created the “Public Art as Resistance in San Jose” project that focuses on a walking tour of 12 of those public works of art that has become a successful community engagement connector between the university and different agencies in San Jose. Because of the nature of wavering funding, as a Digital Humanist and experienced project manager, I was keenly aware of the need for creating a sustainable digital footprint and embedding an ethics of (digital) care for the local artists who created these works. With attention to issues such as data privacy and intellectual property rights, we collaboratively created the digital story of 12 public works of art and their representative resistance in a way that’s valuable for all parties, including future users of the materials. In this way Digital Humanities becomes part of the resistance – resistance against the belief that public art is ephemeral, according to the developers who are knocking down buildings without thinking about preservation of these representations of resistance. This presentation focuses on the digital interventions inherent to this collaborative project that aided in preserving the voices of those diverse communities: https://www.sjsu.edu/ha-public-art-tour/about/

Bio: Katherine D. Harris is Director of Public Programming, College of Humanities & the Arts and Professor of Literature & Digital Humanities at San José State University (SJSU). She teaches and publishes about literature and technology. After publishing her monograph Forget Me Not: The Rise of the British Literary Annual, a digital edition of 19th-century periodicals, and a print edition focusing on British 19th-century literary annuals and women’s voices, she co-edited the award-winning un-book, Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities. She is the architect of the existing H&A in Action initiative in the College of Humanities & the Arts and is responsible for fostering cross-disciplinary programming and community engagement all across SJSU. She is the project investigator on the DH@CSU initiative to build a Digital Humanities consortium across all 23 Cal State campuses funded by the Mellon Foundation and the Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium and is involved in spearheading the new H&A center, Advanced Institute for Ethical Technologies which is currently focusing on the speeding development of artificial intelligence. Her work with community engagement has garnered several grants for the Public Art as Resistance in San José project and allowed her to explore the field of Public Humanities. You can find her as @triproftri on BlueSky or visit her WordPress site.

2024 CIDS Online Student Conference

CIDS logo

The College of Professional and Global Education (CPGE)’s 2024 Online Student Conference is held during February 20-22, 2024. The Conference seeks to connect students across the college and promote student work and aims to provide an opportunity for CPGE students to share their school or professional work, help students communicate and connect with each other, and ultimately foster a stronger sense of community among students.

View Student Presentations on Conference Website

All student presentations are pre-recorded video presentations housed on the conference website.

Live Opening & Closing Session

Opening Session: February 20, 2024, 12:00-1:00 pm (Pacific)

Presentation Recording Link

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Bharat Mehra

Professor & EBSCO Endowed Chair in Social Justice
School of Library and Information Studies
University of Alabama
https://bmehra.people.ua.edu/

Title: Social Justice and Action Research to Extend the Field of Information: Dismantling White Entrenched Systemic Hegemonies

Description: Dr. Bharat Mehra will discuss social justice and action research intersections across his recent work in the field of information (including library and information science) to generate community-wide positive impacts. In the process he provides a critical positionality to his “voice” toward strategic actions that can dismantle white entrenched systemic hegemonies in research, teaching, service, and practice.

Biography: Dr. Mehra is EBSCO Endowed Chair in Social Justice and Professor in the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alabama. His research focuses on diversity and social justice in library and information science (LIS) and community informatics or use of information and communication technologies to empower minority and underserved populations to make meaningful changes in their everyday lives. Dr. Mehra primarily teaches courses on social justice and inclusion advocacy, diversity and inclusive leadership in information organizations, community-engaged scholarship, outreach to diverse populations, public library management, collection management, and grant development for information professionals.

Closing Session: February 22, 2024, 12:00-1:00 pm (Pacific)

Presentation Recording Link

Krishna Gadiraju-Slides

Keynote Speaker: Krishna Gadiraju, MSEE

Doctoral Candidate
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Louisiana State University

Title: Advanced AI Applications in Healthcare

Description: In the dynamic realm where Artificial Intelligence (AI) intersects with healthcare, a profound transformation unfolds, unveiling unparalleled possibilities and advancements. The fusion of advanced AI technologies with healthcare practices holds the promise to not only reshape the landscape of medical research, diagnosis, treatment, and patient care but also to set new standards for enhanced healthcare outcomes. This talk delves into the need for integrating Advanced AI applications in healthcare, recognizing the escalating complexity and challenges faced by the industry. It introduces a proactive solution rooted in graph theory to identify infectious hotspots in urban healthcare environments, constructing a patient-specific graph that adeptly captures intricate inter-dependencies and health dynamics for effective outbreak management. The subsequent discussion seamlessly aligns with the critical demand for advanced AI in healthcare, focusing on optimizing Large Language Models (LLMs). By employing graph theory and clique-finding methods to craft a prompt-specific graph, this approach aims to refine the capabilities of LLMs, enhancing their understanding of context, semantics, and domain-specific intricacies. This initiative directly contributes to the augmentation of AI tools tailored for healthcare applications. Together, these initiatives underscore the transformative potential of Advanced AI applications in healthcare. The integration of diverse patient data and the optimization of LLMs represent a strategic response to the multifaceted challenges faced by the healthcare industry. This talk endeavors to showcase these pioneering initiatives, emphasizing a unified approach that provides a tangible blueprint for the seamless integration of cutting-edge AI tools into healthcare practices.

Biography: Gadiraju received his Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering (B. Tech EEE) from JNTU Kakinada in May 2013. He then received his Post Graduate Diploma Degree from NPTI-PSTI-Bangalore, and worked as a Jr. Electrical Engineer in Elpro International Ltd. in Pune, India. He then joined Louisiana State University to pursue his master’s degree in Electrical Engineering in the spring semester of 2016. He received his degree of Master of Science in Electrical Engineering (MSEE) in Fall 2018. He is currently a doctoral candidate in electrical and computer engineering.

2023 CPGE Online Student Conference

The College of Professional and Global Education (CPGE)’s 2023 Online Student Conference is held during February 14-17, 2023. The Conference seeks to connect students across the college and promote student work and aims to provide an opportunity for CPGE students to share their school or professional work, help students communicate and connect with each other, and ultimately foster a stronger sense of community among students.

View Student Presentations on Conference Website

All student presentations are pre-recorded video presentations housed on the conference website. Please visit this page to view the presentations and comment!

Live Opening & Closing Session

Opening Session, Feb 14, 2023, 1-2 pm Pacific

Mike Meth is the Dean for the SJSU Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, Library. Formerly, he was the Associate Dean, Research and Learning Services at the Florida State University (FSU) Libraries. Prior to joining FSU, Michael was the Director of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education library at the University of Toronto (UofT), and before that the Director of the Li Koon Chun Finance Learning Centre, UofT Mississauga Library. While at UofT, Michael also held an appointment as adjunct faculty at the Institute for Management of Innovation at the UofT Mississauga.

Over the years, Michael has taught many graduate and undergraduate courses on a variety of topics such as leadership in libraries, finance, and on innovation (with a particular focus on the design thinking methodology). Michael has published books, chapters, articles and frequently presents on topics related to libraries including blockchain, neurodiversity, and leadership. Notable are his books “Blockchain in Libraries” (2019), and “Case Studies in Academic Library Management” (2017, co-edited).

Closing Session, Feb 17, 2023, 1-2 pm Pacific

Dr. Luca Giancardo is an Associate Professor at the Center for Precision Health, School of Biomedical Informatics (SBMI), University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) with co-appointments at the McGovern Medical School and the Institute for Stroke and Cerebrovascular Diseases, UTHealth. He is a computer scientist by training with extensive experience in image/signal analysis and machine learning applied to biomedical sciences.

His work has been applied to several biomedical applications, such as stroke diagnosis, diabetic retinopathy screening, or neurodegenerative disease tracking, and successfully translated to industry with two startups based on his methods. One, Hubble Telemedical, was acquired by Welch Allyn, another, nQ-Medical has raised significant investment. He has authored/co-authored more than 60 peer-reviewed articles which were featured by news outlets such as MIT Technology Review, Smithsonian magazine, and others. He has received multiple awards including SBMI Dean’s Excellence Award for Research and the 100k Singapore Challenge, with the judging panel uniquely composed of Nobel Prize, Turing award, and Millennium Technology Prize winners. His research and lab have been supported by competitive grants from the National Institute of Health, Translational Research Institute for Space Health, foundations, and private companies.