Summary of Outreach and Inclusion Activities

The DLI2 project is currently supporting nine PhD students (Kathleen Dunn, Panagiotis Ipeirotis, Shahram Ebadollahi Noemie Elhadad, Min-Yen Kan, Smaranda Muresan, Mike Charney, Simon Lok, Eneida Mendonca). In addition to these students, there are several undergraduate and graduate students from the Centre for Medical Education at McGill University who have assisted in the analysis of data collected at the Columbia site. Note that four of the nine students are female, including the Ph.D. student supported in the Medical Informatics program.

A female high school intern has been accepted to work with the DLI2 project during the summer 2000. Ann Marie Yoo, an incoming senior at Ardsley High School, is working with the summarization and library teams to build a test corpus. A well-defined project has been designed to give her a balance of technical and project experience during the summer. She has been included in all top-level meetings, e.g. with the libraries team to discuss resources. A seminar is planned for the fall for her to present her results to the group, which will further provide her with a direct learning experience.

Projects have been defined for the 2000-2001 year to involve Master's and undergraduate level students in the PERSIVAL project. Now that the research program is underway, we can include more active outreach and training for unfunded project students. The size and interdisciplinary nature of PERSIVAL provides an opportunity to define projects for these students that reach across departments thus providing realistic work experiences.

Our industry outreach program has permitted us to place several of our students in summer internship programs. This provides several benefits. First, these students represent the PERSIVAL project and thus disseminate information about the project. Second, such internships permit additional training for research students. Finally, the connections and interactions with these students aids in keeping the industry partners actively involved in the project.