Research Labs
The School of Information research labs function as places for scholarly work, student interaction, and discovery.
Astrolabe
The Astrolabe Project is working with CyVerse cyberinfrastructure to provide an easy-to-use, reliable and long-lived environment for processing, storage and visualization of valuable scientific data that are not managed as part of existing missions and trusted repositories. Particular emphasis is given to individual researchers and research groups with older, orphaned datasets that can add context to new research enterprises.
Biodiversity Informatics
The Biosemantic Research Group focuses on converting factual information from biodiversity literature to computable data, covering research in information extraction, controlled vocabulary/ontology construction, and knowledge modeling.
Computational Language Understanding Lab
The Computational Language Understanding Lab at University of Arizona is a team of faculty, students, and research programmers who work together to build systems that extract meaning from natural language texts, including question answering (answering natural language questions), information extraction (extracting specific relations and events), semantic role labeling (extracting semantic frames that model who did what to whom, when and where), parsing the discourse structure of complex texts, and other computational linguistics problems.
Digital Storytelling and Oral History Lab
The Digital Storytelling and Oral History (DS|OH) Lab communicates digital storytelling and oral history research to a broader public as engaged research and, importantly, as a vehicle for social justice. DS|OH Lab does this by providing scholars and community members with hands-on training in critical media skills as well as in a diverse set of research methods to include participatory and feminist action research methods and those community-based methods that emerge through decolonizing methodologies.
Extended Reality and Games Lab
The Extended Reality and Games Lab (XRG Lab) performs research on novel interaction techniques and enhancing extended (virtual/augmented/mixed) reality systems for improved usability and user experience. Our work mainly consists of design, development and evaluation (through empirical user studies) of these interaction techniques and enhanced extended reality systems.
The XRG Lab is located in School of Information’s Room 418 at the University of Arizona and it includes cutting-edge equipment such as advanced stationary and mobile virtual reality systems, mixed reality systems, high-performance computer workstations and custom tangible interaction prototypes.
For more information or inquiries, contact lboz@email.arizona.edu
Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Lab
The Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Lab applies state-of-the-art methods in computational intelligence to research problems that span disciplinary boundaries. We are working to model human cognitive development in silico, with robots or softbots in game environments as the “babies” being raised or trained. Other research interests include the sensorimotor foundations of human language; several projects in the last decade have developed algorithms for sensor-to-symbol kinds of processing in service of learning the meanings of words, most recently, verbs; and Education Informatics, which includes intelligent tutoring systems, data mining and statistical modeling of students’ mastery and engagement, assessment technologies, ontologies for representing student data and standards for content, architectures for content delivery, and so on. There are many opportunities to develop and apply AI technologies to provide high-quality education for all students (e.g., K12@UA, Teach Ourselves).
