This summer, iLab members attended six conferences: the GRAND Conference in Ottawa Ontario, the Coastal Zone Canada Conference in Charlottetown PEI, the IIiX Conference and HCIR Workshop in New Brunswick, New Jersey, the AMCIS Conference in Lima Peru, and the ECDL Conference in Edinburgh Scotland. All members participated in various capacities, from presenting research papers, to impromptu presentations on value of social media, to poster boasters to participating in(and winning!) an Oxford style debate.

iLab Members Samantha Dutka and Jennifer Weldon, and iLab Director, Dr. Elaine Toms returned from a successful trip to PEI to present a poster entitled "Preliminary Analysis of Information Needs of Coastal Zone Managers." The team also gave a talk on social media, and how it can be used to raise awareness of current issues, specifically in the area of coastal zone management.

The iLab would like to congratulate Angela Manyangara on the completion and presentation of her thesis, entitled "Effects of Cognitive Style and Curiosity on Multitasking." Angela's thesis is being presented at the IIiX conference this August in New Jersey. Congratulations Angela, and we wish you the best in all of your future endeavors!

iLab members Sarah Gilbert and Lori McCay-Peet, and iLab Director, Dr. Elaine Toms, are presenting a poster entitled "Supporting Task with Information Appliances: Taxonomy of Needs" at the HCIR Workshop in August. HCIR 2010 is the fourth workshop on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval held in conjunction with IIiX. This will be the fifth iLab publication presented at the event. Congratulations!

iLab members Samantha Dutka, Jennifer Weldon, Lori McCay-Peet, and Sandra Toze, and iLab Director Elaine Toms return from Ottawa after participating in the Graphics Animation and New Media (GRAND) Conference. One of the goals of the Conference was to allow face-to-face meetings between research team members from Canadian universities. Samantha, Jennifer, Lori, and Sandra presented three posters describing their research at the poster session and Elaine presented a “two-minute madness” talk on the nGAIA project. Welcome back!

The iLab is pleased to announce that five of its members will be attending the Information Interaction in Context 2010 Conference in New Brunswick New Jersey this August!

Angela Manyangara is presenting “The Effect of Cognitive Style and Curiosity on Information Multitasking” by Angela Manyangara and Elaine Toms. The paper is part of the research Angela has done for her Master’s Thesis in the Masters of Library and Information Studies programme at Dalhousie University’s School of Information Management.

Sandra Toze, PhD student and iLab member, has recently been accepted to participate in two upcoming international conferences. In August she will be attending the Information Interaction in Context Symposium, IIiX 2010 Doctoral Consortium in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Her submission for this was based on her thesis proposal, “Group Information Process: Using Task to Deconstruct Information Flow in Groups”.

Elaine Toms, Sandra Toze, Lori McCay-Peet, Jennifer Weldon, and Samantha Dutka will be attending the first annual GRAND conference June 2-4th in Ottawa. The iLab will be involved with three projects through GRAND: Media Enabled Organizational Workflow (MEOW), Access to new media: search retrieval, and dissemination (News), and Next Generation Information Appliances (nGAIA). Elaine Toms is a Network Investigator for the GRAND, part of the Canadian Networks of Centres of Excellence (NCE) program. For more information on the NCE, go to http://www.nce-rce.gc.ca/

Welcome to the iLab at Dalhousie University.

At the iLab we are interested in determining how to best facilitate access, analysis, sharing, and use of information. Information is the new currency and technology, the enabler.