Serhiy Polyakov: Eugene Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship

I came to the University of North Texas with the goal of receiving a high quality education that would advance me both personally and professionaly. This is not an easy endeavor in every aspect, especially for international students. That is why it is such an honor for me to have received the Eugene Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship offered by Beta Phi Mu. This award encouraged me to work harder to achieve my academic goals. The Fellowship helped me with travel to a conference, and with purchasing computer equipment and books I needed for my research. I am thankful to Dr. Eugene Garfield and Beta Phi Mu for their generosity in supporting research activities in the field of information sciences.

I received my MS in Information Science degree from the University of North Texas in 2004. I am currently a doctoral candidate in the UNT’s Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Information Science and work for the Texas Center for Digital Knowledge as a Senior Research Assistant. Previously, I worked as a Teaching Assistant of Information Organization. I received my undergraduate degree in Ukraine and worked there as an Assistant Instructor of Information Technology and as an Engineer.

My interests include information retrieval, metadata, and information systems. Upon the completion of my Ph.D., I plan to work for a company and participate in research activities that focus on the design and development of information retrieval systems. At some point later in my career, I would also like to consider teaching Information Science at the university level.

My dissertation research deals with the evaluation of performance of Interactive Information Retrieval system based on Latent Semantic Indexing. The model of evaluation I am using presents a hybrid of the two main approaches to IR systems evaluation—the system-driven and the cognitive user-oriented approaches. During the past year I presented at the ASIS&T Annual Meeting and also my poster was accepted for another conference I will be attending in the near future. Currently I am also working on an article for a major journal. I am confident that my dissertation research will be fruitful and will have practical and theoretical application. The Eugene Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship helped me a great deal in achieving my goals.