Maritime university offers researcher a "fabulous opportunity"

October 29, 2004

Maritime university offers researcher a "fabulous opportunity"

by Catherine Young

	Associate professor of Business Administration Elaine Toms holds the Canada Research Chair in Management Informatics and is a key researcher in a new national network.

She likes us. She really, really likes us.

Luckily for us, Elaine Toms could not resist a chance to return to Dalhousie, her alma mater. The warm and articulate Canada Research Chair in Management Informatics is happy to return to her Atlantic roots to pursue her research.

Besides being a Canada Research Chair, her main responsibility is as an Associate Professor in Management Informatics in the School of Business Administration. "Management informatics ... looks at innovative computing and telecommunications solutions to solve management problems."

Her research is multifaceted but in explaining what she does, Toms says simply that she wants to "integrate information access, storage, management and use into an interface and make the action seamless. The interface should be blended so well that it would be like a cook in a kitchen. We know exactly what tool we want based on what we're cooking at the moment."

She is one of Dalhousie's co-investigators in the Network for Effective Collaboration Through Advanced Research (NECTAR). The other is Kori Inkpen of Computer Science. As part of NECTAR, Toms will assess the effectiveness and efficiency of a Webcasting system as an education delivery system, particularly for video information access and use.

She's looking forward to the new Faculty of Management Building, where she plans to have a comprehensive informatics lab - observing people as they work on computers and using that information to design effective solutions. "There are many ways of examining what people do when faced with a new application. You can even track people's facial expressions which will tell you something about the level of satisfaction and comfort with what they're being asked to do." This information gathered from these and other observations may assist the future design of more intuitive, interactive computer technologies.

Toms recently returned to Dalhousie after four years at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Information Studies.

Like a lot of Atlantic Canadians, she found the siren call to return to her East Coast roots utterly irresistible. A Canada Research Chair at Dalhousie didn't hurt, either.

"I'm not an urban person. I love the Maritimes. I'm a Newfoundlander and secondly, it's a fabulous opportunity."

See also: Improving distance communication goal of new national network