AIIP 2019 Annual Conference

When AIIP was founded, information work was a somewhat quiet backwater. Thirty-odd years later, it is a teeming center of innovation … and a cause for some concern for enterprises and the public alike. We now know that “search” is only one task in a long information process that is central to decision making. Information professionals, with their expertise in organizing, finding, analyzing, and disseminating information are a key component in this process.

The presentation covers the information management process and its pitfalls – selecting sources and assessing bias, and normalizing, structuring, and analyzing pools of data – and looks at the ethical and other challenges all information practitioners and users are facing.

Throughout her career, Susan Feldman (an AIIP founder and its president 1992-93) has analyzed information and the technologies, tools, and trends. She ran Datasearch for two decades before joining IDC to track markets and trends in search, text analytics, unified information access, and big data. Her book The Answer Machine launched her latest career in cognitive computing. Her current business, Synthexis, helps AI vendors envision new applications and understand the interaction needs of information processes and tasks. She is now creating a set of decision tools to help businesses assess their information processes and decide on their AI needs.