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Assistant Professor Brian Dobreski has just wrapped up his second year at the School of Information Sciences, and despite one of those years being in a pandemic, he\u2019s still managed to produce exceptional research that earned him the SIS 2021 Bonnie Carroll and Roy Cooper Faculty Enrichment Award.<\/p>\n
In the last couple of years, Dobreski has continued work on a knowledge organization project to better label archival photos of sideshow performers, and he\u2019s started new work on defining what personhood means in relation to works created by artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s been able to publish multiple papers out of the knowledge organization project, done so with the help of students who assisted with a lot of the manual work of combing through data. Dobreski explained that many of the terms used to describe photos of the sideshow performers are now considered \u2013 and even in their time were considered \u2013 to be quite derogatory. So his goal was to, \u201cTry not to obscure that language, but help people understand who these individuals were.\u201d Much of the time, this included adding medical descriptions of conditions the performers had, as well as using terms that modern-day communities use to describe themselves, he said.<\/p>\n
The next steps for this research is making an automated algorithm process to go through similar collections to look for the older language and assign the contemporary terms that Dobreski and his collaborators have set. In addition to all this work, one of his collaborators is also working to publish the datasets as linked data and make them open datasets.<\/p>\n
The personhood project is one that looks ahead to the future and anticipates issues that are already arising with the increasing popularity of artificial intelligence programs.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis project deals with personhood in information, who or what gets to be considered a person. So with artificial intelligence, do we consider that to be a person? If it creates something, does it have creative rights or responsibility?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
For example, if someone creates an AI program and that program ends up creating a painting \u2013 who is the creator? The AI or the program creator? Dobreski already published one paper at the 2021 Libraries in the Digital Age conference on this topic, which addressed the definition of what a person is. Dobreski found 10 different definitions of what a person is just within standards in the field of information sciences. He is asking these questions because persons are afforded different rights, so it\u2019s important to know what, or who, a person is.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven in our field, we have certain rights and responsibilities we associate with persons, but it\u2019s not consistent across the field. The idea is in looking at this, we\u2019ll better understand some of the coming issues we\u2019ll face with artificial intelligence,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Some of those issues include audiences becoming accustomed to believing anything they see on video, but what if that video has been altered \u2013 such as is the case with \u201cdeepfake\u201d videos that replace one person\u2019s face with another person\u2019s? How do audiences understand and make sense of these \u201cpersons\u201d? Dobreski hopes his research can help highlight existing or potential issues within this realm.<\/p>\n
He also wants to address a more traditional cataloging topic starting in the fall, which is how catalogers are using the new edition of the Resource Description and Access (RDA). Traditionally, the RDA has been presented online as a book-like interface with chapters and sections, whereas the new version\u2019s interface is more akin to a search knowledgebase. This research builds on Dobreski\u2019s doctoral dissertation, which was about how people read and understood the RDA in its old form.<\/p>\n
As for the award, Dobreski said he\u2019s honored to be recognized and appreciates the extra funding to apply towards conferences and travel that supports his research \u2013 something he\u2019s very hopeful he\u2019ll get to do more of this next year as the COVID-19 pandemic declines, more people are vaccinated, and travel resumes.<\/p>\n
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Assistant Professor Brian Dobreski has just wrapped up his second year at the School of Information Sciences, and despite one of those years being in a pandemic, he\u2019s still managed to produce exceptional research that earned him the SIS 2021 Bonnie Carroll and Roy Cooper Faculty Enrichment Award. In the last couple of years, Dobreski […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[129,163,22,56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-123850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faculty-news","category-faculty-research","category-faculty-spotlight","category-featured-story"],"yoast_head":"\n