Liddy named interim dean of Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies

Liddy named interim dean of Syracuse University’s School of Information StudiesJune 28, 2007Kevin Morrowkdmorrow@syr.edu

Elizabeth Liddy G’77, Ph.D. ’88, Trustee Professor of Information Studies at Syracuse University, has been appointed interim dean of SU’s School of Information Studies (iSchool) effective July 15, according to SU Vice Chancellor and Provost Eric F. Spina.

Liddy, who is also director of SU?s Center for Natural Language Processing ( http://www.cnlp.org/), will administer the school as a national search continues for a successor to the current dean, Raymond von Dran, who will step down in August to begin a year of administrative leave before returning to the faculty in fall 2008. He has served as dean of the iSchool since 1995, upon his arrival at SU from the University of North Texas, where he had been dean of the information school.

“Liz is highly respected in her field as well as by the iSchool faculty and staff,” Spina says. “She is held in equally high regard across campus for her scholarship, teaching and selfless service. I have the deepest confidence in Liz to lead the iSchool during this important period.”

Spina says the iSchool dean search committee, chaired by Maxwell School Dean Mitchel Wallerstein, is continuing its efforts to identify and evaluate appropriate candidates to become the school’s permanent dean.

“I am delighted that Liz Liddy has agreed to lead our school,” von Dran says. “She has served as a faculty leader since I came to SU. She knows our faculty, students and curriculum more than anyone?but more importantly she embodies the school’s values and understands our culture and our soul. Although she will serve in an interim capacity, I am sure she will propel the school forward to yet an even higher level of leadership and stature.”

“I am deeply honored to be selected as interim dean of the iSchool at Syracuse,” Liddy says. “My broad exposure to other iSchools reinforces my strong belief in the superior education provided our students and the high quality of the research done here. I look forward to working with the faculty, staff and other units on campus to continue our growth and prestige in this era when information is so centrally important to all endeavors.”

Liddy began at SU in 1983 as a visiting assistant professor/research associate. She became an assistant professor in 1987, associate professor in 1993 and professor in 1998. She was named Trustee Professor of Information Studies in 2004.

Liddy was appointed director of the Center for Natural Language Processing in 1999. The center’s mission is to advance the development of human-like language understanding software capabilities for government, commercial and consumer applications.

In addition to her SU positions, she is an adjunct professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Upstate Medical University.

Liddy’s main academic focus is natural language processing (NLP), an area of research in which she has been active since her dissertation research that culminated in her award-winning dissertation in 1988, one of the first to prove the utility of NLP for information science.

Since then, Liddy has led 65 research projects, with the support of numerous government agencies and commercial enterprises and all based on the use of NLP for improved information access and analytics. She has developed advanced system capabilities for information extraction, information retrieval, data-mining, question-answering, document summarization, cross-language retrieval, Web-based retrieval, text-mining and automatic metadata generation. Liddy is the co-inventor on five patents dealing with NLP and has authored more than 110 research papers and given hundreds of conference presentations on her work.

At SU, Liddy teaches graduate courses in information retrieval, natural language processing and data mining. She is also the faculty advisor of Women in Information Technology, a student group that supports and mentors female IT students.

Among her many honors, Liddy is recipient of the Tibbetts Award from the SBIR Program of the U.S. Small Business Administration (1998), the Enterprise Award for Technology from the Upstate New York Technology Business Forum (1998), the Outstanding Alumni Award from SU (2000) and The Post-Standard & Syracuse Federation of Women’s Clubs Achievement Award (2005). In addition, she is a member of Beta Phi Mu, the library and information studies honor society, and Sigma Xi, the international honor society of scientific and engineering research.

She holds a bachelor’s degree in English language and literature from Daemen College (1966) and an M.L.S. in information studies (1977) and a Ph.D. in information transfer (1988), both from SU.