Dr Sam Chu (Director of ASIS&T Chapter Assembly) interviewed Dr. Dan Wu (Current Chair of AP Chapter) and Dr. Tina Du (Past Chair of AP Chapter)
Dr. Sam Chu
Director of Chapter Assembly
ASIS&T
Dr. Dan Wu
Chair of the Asia Pacific Chapter
ASIS&T
Dr. Tina Du
Past-Chair of the Asia Pacific Chapter
ASIS&T
Sam: Thank you Dan and Tina for accepting my interview invitation regarding the great conference that you held in Wuhan, China in Dec 2020. Dr. Dan Wu is a Professor at the School of Information at Wuhan University. Dr. Tina Du is an Associate Professor of Information Studies in the UniSA STEM, University of South Australia. They, together with a large team of collaborators, held a very successful 2020 ASIS&T Asia Pacific Regional Conference. So I want to learn the secret of their success.
Dan: Thank you for your introduction. Due to the pandemic, we had to hold the conference online, so we had to prepare intensively for the conference.
Sam: Thanks, Dan. Perhaps Tina can give us some background information on what ASIS AP has been doing in recent years especially regarding holding regional conferences?
Tina: Sure. Thanks Sam for this opportunity to reflect on what we have done in the past few years for the Asia Pacific chapter. The ASIS&T Asia Pacific chapter was established in October 2012. This regional chapter aims to facilitate networking and knowledge exchange among ASIS&T members, located in all Asia Pacific countries. It also strives to contribute to professional development and help publicize ASIS&T as an international Information Science and Technology Association, and these activities within the professional community in the region. So we are committed to encouraging and embracing wide and deep participation from broad members on concerned issues and the solutions. This is the vision, I think for the Asia Pacific chapter.
In light of this vision, regional collaborations have been strengthened in multiple ways--in multiple pathways, actually. Holding regional conferences is definitely evidence [to showcase] collaborative endeavor.
As an essential part of the ASIS&T, the Asia Pacific regional conference provides a platform to advance the information sciences and the related applications of information technology and communications and collaborations between information professionals, organizations, and industries within the Asia Pacific region.
In January 2019, we held our first Asia Pacific regional conference in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, under the leadership of then chapter chair, Dr. Sam Chu. It was a very meaningful event, because that conference and the whole chapter committee were committed to constructing a bridge to facilitate knowledge exchange among people from different cultures and technological environments.
So, as you know, some ASIS members might have learned from this first regional conference website, and decided to continue such meaningful activities. So following the successful Cambodia conference, the Asia Pacific chapter was honored to hold this 2020 conference in December last year hosted by Wuhan University.
Sam: Maybe Dan can tell us about the conference held by Wuhan University, such as the themes, the topics, and subtopics. How many people were involved in the organising committee, and how many participants were there?
Dan: The theme of the ASIS&T Asia-Pacific Regional Conference 2020 is information behaviour and human-computer interaction. The conference aims to promote the multidisciplinary and ever-evolving area of information behaviour and human-computer interaction. Research on relevant topics lays a key foundation for connecting users and designers. The conference intends to provide an open platform for the information community to engage in the dynamics of the information field.
We received about 60 submissions for long and short papers, and in the end, we accepted 22 papers. Finally, we have about 9 posters presented at the conference and 2 panels. As for the participants, we received 185 registrations, from different countries, not just from the Asia Pacific region.
Sam: Tina, do you have anything to add regarding this?
Tina: Yeah, absolutely. We were very fortunate to have experts and authors from the whole Asia Pacific region and beyond, who stayed with us for the two-day conference as well as the preparation of papers and presentations and sharing of their resources, knowledge, and their opinions with us. This is a real asset for the whole region, and to the Information Science and Technology community. So, I think for participants and attendees, their contributions are highly valuable to the development of the information field in the region.
Sam: Okay, thank you Tina. To my understanding, it was a very successful event. Dan, how did you pull off this successful event?
Dan: We invited 4 famous speakers: 3 of them were from the US, and one from the renowned Chinese company Xiaomi. The Keynote attracted many attendees. So there was Gary Marchionini, Sanda Erdelez, Jim Jansen, and Bin Wang.
Dan: Our school supported us a lot – most of the professors from the data and information management and editorial office did a lot. We also had a very successful organising committee and many volunteers. The organising committee includes Feicheng Ma and Tina Du, and me. There were also the program chairs: Jim Jansen, Yuelin Li, Tingting Jiang. They did a lot to select high-quality papers.
For each paper, we invited two reviewers, as a way to ensure high-quality submissions. We also had track chairs, where we asked them to find papers for us to get many submissions. We also had panel chairs who helped us organise the panels. The panels were very successful and they helped a lot. We also had local chairs. Despite it being a virtual conference, we set a conference room for the opening and closing so it is like real life. We set computers in the room where they worked.
We also had publication chairs. The conference program was published by Data and Information Management which is a peer-reviewed and open-access journal. The journal helped publish the programme. We can have more readers this way. We also have 4 publicity chairs, helping us with the conference publicity so more people can know about the conference. We also have sponsorship chairs. When we decided to host the conference in June at Wuhan University, they wanted to sponsor us some gifts or books. Due to the pandemic, we had to make the conference virtual, so we got some support from the School of Information Management, Wuhan University, and from Data and Information Management (the journal) and also from the Information Resources Institute of Wuhan University. We also had volunteer chairs who helped us recruit volunteers. We have about 20 volunteers - the undergrad or graduate students of our school. We set 2 volunteers as the host of each session, they had to play videos, record the conference, and write publicity news. We sent certificates to them and they were very happy, saying that they learnt a lot from the volunteer work.
Sam: Tina, is there anything that you’d like to add?
Tina: I would like to thank the colleagues, all the dedication of the local conference organizing committee and I'm also grateful to my Asia Pacific chapter colleagues: Dr. Sam Chu, Dan Wu, Safirotu Khoir who is the secretary for the Asia Pacific chapter who maintained all the meeting minutes when we had a monthly meetings to discuss and conference details, preparations, organization. And Waseem Afzal from Australia’s Charles Sturt University, who is the treasurer for the chapter, as well as Chao Min who served as web administrator for the AP chapter. So we all contributed as the Asia Pacific chapter committee members to the conference organization. I would also like to thank the ASIS&T’s Executive Director, Lydia Middleton, and Terrence Curtiss, the Director of Membership. And so, I think this collective effort, in leading us and working through 2020, that challenging year, [helped us] to hold the successful AP conference.
Sam: Certainly, we are fortunate to have a very committed team to work together on the two conferences and also receive ample support from the Headquarter. I understand that there were different awards set up for the papers, Dan, can you share more about that?
Dan: We have long and short papers, and we set one best long paper and one best short paper. We also set two nominations for long and short papers. We first organised an award committee, from the programme committee. We selected papers based on their review score, and we also considered which country or region they are from. Finally, we have one best paper for the long and short paper. We also prepared award certificates and gifts for the awardees. We announced the awards as the closing and we mailed the gifts to the authors.
Sam: Besides the best papers, I think the conference had another category too. Such as the honourable mentions? Can you tell us more about that?
Dan: Yes. For the nominations, we gave them honourable mention awards. So finally, one best long paper and two honourable best mention long papers, and one best short paper, and 2 best honourable short papers. In total, there were 6 awards.
Another success for the conference was about the poster. At first, we didn’t set the poster track, we just called for long and short papers. But after the accepted papers, we asked the authors of the unaccepted papers to revise their papers based on their comments and change their papers to posters. We hoped to give more chances to the authors to present their work. We also asked the poster authors to make a “one-minute madness".Then we composed the “madness” and played the video at the beginning of the poster session as a way to introduce their posters. We used breakout rooms to interact with each poster presenter.
Tina: Yeah, I see Dan has pretty much covered it all regarding the awards. And we have discussed and set up the paper awards and honorable mentions. I think that’s a great opportunity for the researchers from the region and beyond to have such an opportunity to produce high quality papers.
Sam: Tina, I understand that all the papers presented at the conference were published in a journal. Will you share your experience in publishing conference papers in a formal publication?
Tina: Yeah, sure. We had a lot of discussions, regarding how to publish the proceedings either in a conference proceedings or in a journal. Because in publication, there will be multiple benefits to the organizers, to the conference fame, to the quality of the publications, but also importantly, to the authors. You know we didn't have that experience before, to publish conference papers in a formal publication. So, we approached a colleague who is also an ASIS&T Asia Pacific a member, her name is Amanda Cossham. She's a regional editor for Information Research journal, and she was also one of the committee members, and also proceedings chair for RAILS conference, an Australia and New Zealand conference in ILS. She gave us a lot of insights from her experience of publishing conference papers in the Information Research Journal, where she served as publisher chair for RAILS conference. So we learned a lot from her. And we think a publication in a journal is a great opportunity also to promote the local publication, from the Asia Pacific region. So that's why we thought about publishing quality conference papers in the journal DIM, Data and Information Management, which is also an open access journal. So this is a great opportunity to promote the local publication, as well as to publish high quality conference proceedings in a formal publication.
Sam: That’s wonderful. I do believe that many participants were happy about the conference. Since more than 180 people joined, do you know whether the event recruited more members for ASIS&T?
Dan: Yes! I think so. I think when people registered, we asked if they were members. Members got discounts when registering. So the registration helped recruiting more members.
Sam: Tina, do you have anything to add regarding this?
Tina: I agree with Dan that definitely holding a regional conference is a great opportunity to promote ASIS&T as an international ILS community or information community to a region where researchers and practitioners may not be aware of this association. So this is a great opportunity to promote the association, the regional conference, and to attract more members. As Dan said we have 180 people registered. I think half of them or maybe nearly, I don't have data, but definitely for people who were first time registrants, ASIS&T gave them membership for one year included in the registration fee.So that’s also one of the [factors] to encourage more people to join ASIS&T.
Sam: Great! Anything else, Tina or Dan, you’d like to say regarding this great conference?
Tina: Yeah, I think this collective effort for a successful regional conference is a great collaboration between the Asia Pacific chapter community, and the local host university. So it has been a great collaboration and we have got great results.
Sam: Thank you Tina and Dan for all your sharing! I certainly hope that similar ASIS&T regional conferences will be held across the world.
Dan: Thank you, Sam, bye!
Tina: Bye, Sam!
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