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Translation: Turning Research into Impacts

 

Setting the Course and Embracing the Journey: Reflections on Knowledge Mobilization in the Canadian Research Context

Knowledge mobilization (KMb) is the movement of research findings between and within academic and non-academic settings. In a recent SSHRC-funded partner development project, Supporting Transparent and Open Research Engagement and Exchange (STOREE), we constructed a KMb plan as part of our funding application. Our work focused on making research more accessible, relevant to, and useful for non-academic audiences, and supporting scholars to change practices around research sharing. Reflecting on the project, team composition, how we worked together, sub-project processes and outcomes, and individual learnings, we gained insights on making alternative outputs and KMb more broadly.

 

Health Information Without Borders: The Struggles and Strategies of Older Chinese Adults in Canada

Have you ever struggled to find the right health information, unsure of where to turn or what advice to trust? For many older Chinese adults in Canada, this challenge is even greater. They often face situations such as navigating a complex healthcare system, overcoming language barriers, and balancing traditional health beliefs with Western medical practices. These challenges can impact how they make health decisions and their overall well-being. Through in-depth interviews with 20 older Chinese adults in Canada, our research explores various factors related to how they seek and use health information. What did we uncover? Join us as we delve into their stories and the broader implications for health equity in Canada.

 

Studying Exploratory Search in Public Digital Libraries: Collaboration & Partnerships

Most search interfaces currently used in public digital libraries have been influenced by design patterns based on web search, even though the complexity of the information seeking process when searching within a public library can be far greater than web search. Web search interfaces work extremely well for lookup search tasks, but they struggle to support complex search, especially those related to exploratory search.

  

Toward Sustainable Data Governance in Refugee and Immigrant Serving Sector in Canada

For governments across the world, evaluating the impact of social service programs is a growing challenge – and they are increasingly turning to data and technology to help manage it. This is especially true for programs serving refugees and immigrants to settle in a new country. From tracking who needs settlement support to deciding who gets benefits first, digital systems and artificial intelligence (AI) are becoming key tools in how social services support refugees and immigrants. But what happens when data systems try to capture something as human and complex as “support”?  

  

Rethinking Reuse in Data Lifecycle in the Age of Large Language Models

In the world we are living in, a digital world, some data slips past our awareness, but very little data ever truly disappears. As we, information scientists, are concerned with reproducibility and responsibility of research, data lifecycle models have been developed to manage the complexity. To foster open, transparent, and collaborative science, data is often archived in a repository at the end of the project according to such data lifecycle models. This is often followed by the last step of the lifecycle models, data reuse. Traditionally, this model is cyclical, with reused data leading to new questions and fueling subsequent rounds of research.

 

Can AI Help to Predict the Scholarly Impact of New Scientific Papers?

This study explores how artificial intelligence (AI), specifically deep representation learning, can predict the scholarly impact of new scientific papers without relying on citation data. Using the SciBERT model, the research introduces two key indicators—Topicality (τ) and Originality (σ)—to estimate the potential impact of newly published papers. The approach is validated using the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset, demonstrating that papers with high topicality or originality are more likely to gain scholarly attention. The findings suggest that AI can complement traditional citation-based metrics, particularly for early-stage research, offering insights into knowledge creation dynamics and interdisciplinary research potential.

Frontiers: Reaching Beyond Human Knowledge

  

Forging a Middle Path: Canada’s Moment to Lead in AI Governance

Today, with the AI landscape evolving rapidly, especially with the explosive advancement of generative AI technologies, Canada finds itself pulled between two global powers: the United States, favouring open innovation, and the European Union, doubling down on strict AI regulation. Canada does have a proposed Artificial Intelligence and Data Act (AIDA), introduced in 2022 as part of Bill C-27, which aims to regulate high-impact AI systems. However, AIDA is still under review and has yet to be finalized, leaving a critical gap in national legislation.

Artificial” Intelligence: What are we trying to achieve?
 

“Deep Research”: A Research Paradigm Shift

While keeping pace with the new developments in generative AI and LLM reasoning models is in itself a challenge, new ‘deep research’ agents are beginning to surface at a remarkably rapid rate.

   

Looking Backwards to See Ahead: The Case of Expert Systems Development in Libraries

During the current moment, as generative AI dominates our thinking, both for its extraordinary performance and serious flaws, a new direction is needed. The way forward may involve looking backward. The addressing the deficiencies of generative AI would benefit from reviewing, and incorporating, some of the lessons from expert system development during the late 20th century.

Opinion: Scholarly Ideas, Scientific Curiosity, Bold Propositions

 

The Great Canadian Breakdown: What will it take to get a “Right to Repair” in Canada?

Fixing things in Canada has never been more difficult. Smartphones, laptops, refrigerators, washing machines, smart speakers, virtual assistants, cars, bicycles, wheelchairs, pacemakers, ventilators, tractors, tanks, fighter jets, and almost every other device or piece of equipment in our homes and workplaces is more costly, more inconvenient, and more difficult, if not impossible, to repair. Barriers to repair impact all industries, sectors, and regions. No one is spared from the Great Canadian Breakdown. As breakdown becomes more pervasive, the need for a comprehensive Canadian “right to repair”  becomes more critical.

 

Professional Qualifications Matrix: An Ongoing Debate on Matching Information Science Education with the Market Needs

Christina J. Steffy and Meg Massey wrote in the October 2024 issue of C&RL News about a challenge that has plagued Information Science education and professional librarians for many years. They specifically focus on one job position at the American Library Association (ALA) and pose reasonable questions to all of us. Can the specialized training of library schools (even if they are innovative and have joined the iSchool movement) prepare graduates for the jobs available in the ALA? Is it not possible to find a person who is more qualified to hold the desired job among the graduates of the adjacent fields, such as Computer Science and Management? Basically, should librarians run the ALA?

   

Looking Backwards to See Ahead: The Case of Expert Systems Development in Libraries

During the current moment, as generative AI dominates our thinking, both for its extraordinary performance and serious flaws, a new direction is needed. The way forward may involve looking backward. The addressing the deficiencies of generative AI would benefit from reviewing, and incorporating, some of the lessons from expert system development during the late 20th century.

Education: Bring Learning and Enlightenment to your Life

 

Information and You: McGill’s Perspectives on Human-Information Interaction Research

From cybersecurity to archives, and everything in between, research at the McGill University School of Information Studies centers around human-information interaction (HII) – putting people, their experiences, their needs, and their priorities at the heart of the research. These vignettes highlight some of the research from SIS faculty, and how it connects people with the information that matters to them.

 

Colonial Tensions: Reconciling Intellectual Freedom and Indigenous Knowledge Systems in One Canadian iSchool

How do we further the enormous task of truth and reconciliation between the fundamental principle of intellectual freedom with the collective sovereignty due to our First Nations siblings? This is a recurring question and theme of the course Foundations of Intellectual Freedom in Librarianship at the iSchool of the University of British Columbia. In the winter of 2023, I was tasked with the development of a dedicated course on intellectual freedom. It is currently one of only three such courses in Canada, alongside the University of Alberta and the University of Toronto.

Climate protest with a group of young people with a sign reading There is no planet B
 

Information in Times of Crisis: Learning Together 

During the summer of 2020, we offered a new graduate course, “Information in Times of Crisis.” With growing recognition of the ways pressing issues such as climate change impacts, racial injustice, and health crises are intertwined, we wanted to better prepare library and information studies graduates to navigate these crises, while experiencing the Covid-19 pandemic together. 

 

Stepping Up to BAT: Inspiration for a Research Process Model

Wouldn’t it be great that at the same time you were learning to read chapter books and basic informational texts, you could learn a research process that could carry you right through post-secondary studies? As M. E. Marland, a member of the UK Schools Council, asserted in 1981, from elementary school to PhD studies, in research, the questions and processes remain fundamentally the same. To find out if that was true for the Canadian context, for my PhD dissertation study I decided to observe the information behaviours of grade-three students as they worked on a class project.

  

Building Capacity for Decision Making Where Information Matters

As educators, we believe we have a responsibility to equip students entering professional careers with the knowledge and skills to consider evidence critically, to understand the roles of various actors who could and should be included in decision processes, and how to arrive at solutions to societal problems effectively. Accordingly, for over a decade we have offered a graduate course, Information in Public Policy and Decision Making, in the Dalhousie University Master of Information program. Unique among the Canadian Information Studies programs, this course is designed to introduce students to the many facets of evidence-based (or evidence-informed) policy and decision-making with the expectation that as the next generation professionals they will understand when and how to facilitate policy development at organizational and local, national, and international levels.

library shelves with sunny window
  

Tracing “CanCon” in Library and Information Science Research

LIS professionals and practitioners may find it challenging to access current research that supports library decision-making, program development, or service evaluation through a distinctly Canadian lens. Public, school, and special libraries did not seem to have the same kind of representation in the research, and it made me wonder: what is the state of Canadian LIS research content?

Spanish: Contenido en español

 

¿Qué significa ser inteligente?

En las últimas dos décadas, la IA ha avanzado a pasos agigantados hasta el punto de que estamos hablando seriamente de que es tan inteligente como los humanos o incluso que los supera. Pero antes de dejarnos llevar demasiado por esa emoción o ese miedo, es importante que miremos hacia dentro y nos preguntemos: ¿qué nos hace inteligentes, conscientes y humanos?

 

Obsesión con los Robots Asesinos como Autorreflexión

Robots asesinos. Inteligencia artificial distópica. Rebeliones de máquinas. ¿Por qué nos fascina tanto la idea de que nuestros aparatos se vuelvan contra nosotros? En este artículo, desentraño nuestra obsesión con el ascenso de las máquinas y demuestro que gran parte de su atractivo es en realidad la proyección de nuestros propios miedos y dilemas.

 

Desarrollo de competencias de búsqueda de información en línea en escolares

las competencias para la investigación en línea de los estudiantes en Chile, no necesariamente están suficientemente desarrolladas para abordar sus tareas escolares.

Chinese Content

 

像人类一样感知:异构图中的结构因果模型学习

近年来,随着复杂系统建模需求的增长,异构图神经网络逐渐成为研究热点。然而,现有方法通常存在固定推理流程和虚假相关性等问题,限制了模型的可解释性和泛化能力。为此,我们提出了一种新颖的异构图学习框架,通过模拟人类感知与决策过程,增强对任务的预测性能与结果解释能力。 核心研究思路 我们提出的方法基于以下关键步骤: 1.语义变量构建:通过图模式与元路径提取出易于人类理解的语义变量,例如论文、作者和会议等。2.因果关系挖掘:采用结构方程模型,自动发现变量之间的因果关系,并利用学习到的因果关系进行预测。3.目标任务预测:通过逆推算法,将语义变量的因果关系转化为目标任务的预测结果。 数据集与实验验证 研究在三个公开数据集(DBLP、ACM和IMDB)上进行了验证,这些数据集涵盖学术、社交和电影推荐等多种场景: DBLP:预测作者的研究领域。ACM:预测论文的学术类别。IMDB:预测电影的类型。 通过引入三种偏差(同质性、度分布、特征分布),验证了模型在不同数据分布下的泛化能力。实验表明,提出的模型在所有设置下表现稳定,泛化能力显著优于现有方法。 主要研究成果 1.泛化性:模型在不同偏差条件下保持较高的预测性能,表现出卓越的适应能力。 2.可解释性:通过因果关系图清晰展示变量间的影响逻辑。例如,作者研究领域与发表论文的会议密切相关,模型捕捉到这一直观规律,并验证了因果推理结果与专家经验的一致性。 实际应用前景 该框架在技术挖掘、金融分析、政策评估等领域具有广泛应用潜力。例如,通过因果关系图辅助技术创新决策,或在金融分析中解释影响因素以提升透明度。此外,其高度可解释性为改进模型逻辑、提升可信度提供了可能性。 总结 异构图学习正在为复杂系统建模与分析带来新的可能性。本研究通过结合因果推理技术与异构图神经网络,不仅实现了对复杂任务的准确预测,还增强了对模型推理过程的理解,为人工智能在实际问题中的应用提供了新的视角。 本文基于以下成果写作完成: Lin, T., Song, K.,

 

跨学科协作下的文化传承:历代古籍目录的数据管护

自先秦诸子开宗立派、传授学说以来,历代学者承袭旧学,开辟新篇,所著经史辞章,累若山海。因此,目录之学成为“学中第一紧要事”,古代读书人从目录中获得“即类求书,因书究学”的治学要领;今天要进入古籍的世界,我们更需要问途于目录。

 

信任,但需核实:我们能使LLMs值得信赖吗?

我相信我们想要信任并使用这些系统,但我们不应该盲目这样做。