Two of our newest Marie Curie PhD fellows, Robin Mays and Roberto Rocha, made inaugural presentations of their research work for the Network for Information Technology and Innovation Management (NITIM) Summer School 2016, held June 15-17 in Trondheim, Norway. This year’s summer school was held in conjunction with IEEE’s 2016 Innovation and Technology Management Conference (ICE).

Roberto Rocha, a first year PhD, presented the community his initial research design and some results of his PhD project through the paper “Collaborative Mapping for Crisis Management.”  Mr. Rocha’s research will explore how “OpenStreetMap” --a project to create a free editable map of the world-- can more effectively support managers in disaster response. Robin Mays, a final year PhD, received an honorable mention for her presentation of the research methodology used in her study of the critical information needs of humanitarian practitioners for success in their work. (Report: Valuing What Works, 2014). Ms. Mays also presented a full research paper, accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the IEEE 2016 ICE conference, entitled “Considering Practitioner-Driven Innovations: Accommodating Information Systems Within Successful Humanitarian Work,” and completed in collaboration with co-researchers at the University of Washington’s (UW) Department of Human-Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE).

It was a rich opportunity for our students to learn from a distinguished panel of mentoring professors and their colleagues from NITIM Graduate School, establish new collaborations, and identify potential future work lines.