Research

Research Areas

USF is a high-impact, global research university. Faculty in the School of Information have active research programs that involve collaborations with other USF affiliated units, centers, and institutes, as well as colleagues nationally and internationally. USF's iSchool has a strong record of funded research projects and other forms of significant scholarly productivity that contributes to the information field and related disciplines. A few areas of focus include:

• Librarianship

  • Focuses on how to classify and use data or objects, emphasizing the importance of preserving knowledge and promoting information literacy, information access, information policy and information management.

• Data Science, Analytics, & Visualization

  • Makes use of machine learning and other computational tools to investigate policy informatics. This involves, as one example, using predictive analytics to analyze social media data to identify meaningful patterns of citizens' political participation.

• Health Informatics

  • Focuses on the use of controlled terminologies in population health and clinical trials, applications of machine learning to study adverse drug events, and usability of mobile health applications.

• Strategic and Cyber Intelligence

  • Focuses on the collecting, analyzing and using data and information to inform decisions about strategy, policies and plans, particularly those pertaining to national security. Cyber intelligence has the same foundation, but it includes additional focus on the cyber domain, requiring a basic computing foundation.

• Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

  • Artificial Intelligence is programming machines to behave as or better than human experts. The field has many subfields including cognitive modeling, software agents and agent systems, natural language processing (NLP), computer vision, expert systems also known as knowledge-based systems, machine learning, and robotics.
    • A subfield of artificial intelligence, machine learning is a combination of human-like and artificial means for enabling artificial intelligences to become smarter over time and as more information is presented to the machine learning system.

• Archive and Data Management

  • Explores how technologies transform archives management practices, theories and workforce, and make recommendations for how archival education programs, professional associations, and commercial service providers should adapt to the shifting archives management landscape. 

• GIS and Crime Analytics

  • Uses geographic information science to investigate the spatial and temporal dimensions of social issues, such as crime, health disparities, and other social problems.  Within this applied area, small unmanned aerial systems (drones) collect and analyze location-based data for intelligence and law enforcement operations.