The iConference first held in Asia

On March 22nd, the iConference 2017 co-organized by the school of information of WHU and Sungkyunkwan University was held in Wuhan, China, which represented its debut in Asia, attracting over 500 experts and scholars in information management domain.

The theme of the conference boosted “Influence, Extension and Promotion: global cooperation across information community”. The conference report covered multiple themes like interpersonal interaction, information behavior, data mining, information retrieval, knowledge discovery, social media, data science, information education, information organization and etc. These manifest the theoretical frontiers of international information management research and simultaneously to provide a great platform in terms of interdisciplinary combination and Knowledge Sharing for experts and scholars throughout the world. More than 400 thesis manuscripts were received in the conference with the enrollment of over 500 people. On the opening ceremony, Dou Xiankang, the president of WHU, first gave his address. He pointed out that the School of Information Management of WHU remained the most time-honored , the largest and the strongest organization in terms of information management education and research. The School of IM successfully became a member of iSchool, which was the league of the top international institutions of information. It was the first time that a Chinese, and a developing country that had got the membership of its core team. Also, this is the second alliance member in Asia. President Dou extended his wishes that the conference would converge the cutting-edge innovation achievements both at home and abroad, as a way to promote the deeper cooperation and comprehensive innovation for members of this field.

Fang qing, Dean of the School of Information Management of WHU and SamOh, professor of the School of Information Science and Data Science of Sungkyunkwan University gave their speeches respectively. Other attendees like Mike Eisenberg, the Initiator of Information Schools Movement and the Founding Dean of Information School at the University of Washington; Jason Rollins, the Senior Director of Intellectual Property and High-Tech Department of the original Thomson Reuters; Li Dongmin, the General Manager of Business Division of Baidu Map; they all made special reports separately.

The conference covered various kinds of communication such as the full paper presentations, the preliminary report, workshop, best practices of iSchool, forum of Deans, the primitive career exchange, sub-forums of interaction and inspiration, Chinese sub-forums, Doctoral Forum and so on. Among them, the Chinese sub-forums and the best practices of iSchool were set for the first time.

According to the introduction, iConference is known as the top academic feast of the International Library and Information Science field. Besides, it is a must-attending annual academic conference to the league members of the world’s leading school of information science, the Dean of the core team, and the Assistant Dean of scientific research. In February, the School of Information Management of WHU won the sponsoring of this conference. The successful convening of the conference enlarged China’s international influence and visibility in information domain. In addition, this was also of significance to improve the international academic status of Chinese information domain, advance research and teaching ability and etc.

Rewritten by Wang Meifang