Special Article: Interview with Global iDeans (5)

Academic Interview with Prof. Min Song, Department of Library and Information Science, Yonsei University

Interviewer: Xinyuan Zhang (Henan Academy of Big Data, Zhengzhou University)

Recorder: Xinyuan Zhang (Henan Academy of BigData, Zhengzhou University)

Qing Xie (Yonsei University)

Reviewer: Nian Ding (School of Information Management, Wuhan University)

 Editor’s Note 

This is the fifth special article of “Interview with Global iDeans”. In the former four articles, the interviewees were from iSchools of North America and Japan. In this interview, we are honored to have Prof. Min Song, the former Director of the Department of Library and Information Science at Yonsei University. The iSchool of Yonsei University is not of large scale, but "small and sophisticated", in which researches of the faculty are highly distinctive and influential. It has conducted a lot cooperation with other schools of the university and the international academic community.

Prof. Min Song's research interests mainly involve text mining, informetrics, medical informatics, socialomics, etc. He is highly active and influential in the field of data science, and is positively committed to exploring the frontiers of LIS and the innovation of research methods. Opportunities of the times, cooperations and communications, as well as innovations have always been the important issues for disciplinary prosperity and development. Currently, the world is facing the double crisis of public health and economic growth, which is unseen in a century. The new global situation has brought more opportunities and challenges to scientific and cultural exchanges between China and Korea. In the post-epidemic era, the field of LIS will not only be affected by computer science technologies, but also be ushered in a new situation of disciplinary applications, which is a rare opportunity for iSchools and the researchers to expand disciplinary boundaries and seek innovative points of disciplinary development.

Brief Introduction of the Interviewee

Prof. Song is a professor of Information Science Department of Yonsei University. He was named an Underwood Distinguished Professor of Yonsei University in 2014. He has published more than 200 international conference and journal papers. Prof. Song has research interests in Biomedical Text Mining, Social Media Data Mining, and Big Data Analytics. Prior to Yonsei, he was a tenured Associate Professor of Information Systems Department at New Jersey Institute of Technology. He received his PhD in Information Science from Drexel University, an MS from Indiana University and a BA from Yonsei University in Korea. He is an editorial board member of Scientometrics and Journal of Informetrics, and also serving as an Associate Editor-in-Chief of Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics and Data & Knowledge Engineering. Recently, he was selected for the 2020 Humanities and Social Sciences Excellent Scholars Program by the National Research Foundation of Korea. He will receive 250 million won during 5 years to support his in-depth research.

01

The Developing Status of iSchool at Yonsei University

Xinyuan Zhang：

Hi professor, it’s really nice to see you again. thank you for taking the time to answer my interview today. How's everything going?

Prof. Song：

Xinyuan and Qing, nice to see you guys again. First of all, congratulations on the JOI paper you just accepted. Hopefully, when the epidemic is under control, we can get together in South Korea or China!

Xinyuan Zhang：

We will start the interview with a discussion about the ischool of South Korea, especially the development of the ischool in Yonsei University. Although Kpop culture has spread all over the world, Chinese scholars, especially iSchools’ Chinese researchers are unfamiliar with South Korea’s higher education system. Online information shows that South Korea’s higher education system, is similar to China, which includes three stages: undergraduate, master’s and doctoral. You are not only a professor in the Department of Library and Information Science of Yonsei University, but also once worked as associate dean of University Development Strategies. Could you please introduce the educational system of master and doctoral students at Yonsei University？Are there tuition subsidies and living expenses subsidies for masters and doctoral students?

Prof. Song：

So about the education system of Yonsei. Yonsei joined in iSchool about 6 years ago. In terms of QS ranking, the international university ranking，QS has a subject ranking, one of the subject is library and information management, and Yonsei was ranked as 28 last year, which is quite impressive.  In Korea, Sungkyunkwan University ranked 24, and Yonsei was 28. It was a good result, which surprised me a lot and I was very happy. About the education system provided for students, as you may know, because you spend one year in the Yonsei. Xie Qing was once as the master of Yonsei and then as a Phd student , almost computing Phd now. So I believe that education of Yonsei is good, if not you won’t chose Yonsei as your study place. After all, both you guys are quite excellent. Right now, we mainly provide two majors for undergraduate, master’s and doctoral, that are information science and library science. Library science primarily trains students for librarian. Information science specialty trains students for data analysis and computer skills. My goal is to train students to let them be a good data scientist in the future. We have about 35 undergraduate student per year. For masters, we give admission for about 13 persons each year. And 4 Phd students each year. That’s the size of our program. We have five faculty members. Although we are looking for new faculty members, it is difficult to recruit. I am going to change my department name, instead of library and information science, the new name is the school of informatics. 

Xinyuan Zhang: 

So, what is the credit system of the masters and doctoral student of Yonsei?

Prof. Song: 

As for the postgraduate credit requirements, the basic enrollment brochures of Yonsei University stipulate that the master's degree is 2 years of study and the doctoral degree is 3 years of study. Both the master's degree and the doctoral degree are required to complete 30 credits. The teaching language of most courses is Korean, but the course presentation and examination paper at the end of the course can choose Korean or English. Before graduation thesis opening, all master's and doctoral students need through the graduation exam, and asked to submit English and Korean language, generally speaking, the graduation thesis opening time of the beginning of the semester, graduates of the master may submit opening in the same semester began to rejoin, PhD graduates need to submit after opening the next semester to reply.

Xinyuan Zhang: 

Mainly for doctoral students, is there any living subsides for them?

Prof. Song：

Our tuition is not much expensive compared with US you know. About 6000~7000 dollars per semester. We have good scholarship for students, both international students and domestic students. And there are several different levels of scholarship for them. Besides that, we have donations for students. We will give 2000 dollars per semester per person. And also if a students join in the lab, like mine, they could get additional research grants.

Xinyuan Zhang: 

Well, that sounds good. As far as I know, it could guarantee a good living status in the Seoul.

Prof. Song: 

aha, yeah, I think so.

Xinyuan Zhang：

You once studied at Drexel University. The Library and Information Science education of Drexel University originated in 1892 and has a long history. At the same time, it is also one of the initiators of the iSchools movement. Yonsei University is also a model for members of the Korean iSchool. Based on your own experience, would you please talk about what opportunities the iSchool movement has brought to the development of Department of Library and Information Science of Yonsei University?

Prof. Song: 

iSchools movement, I think it is a right direction to follow. Yonsei, as you know, was started as a library science department. About 10 years ago, we move to information science program, iSchools movement help us to see which directions we should take. iSchools have several programs, which is library science, information science, computer science and other multi-disciplinary dimensions. Unfortunately, in Korea, the library and information science department like Yonsei, we have very small faculty members. It is not an exception. Other school are in the same situation. Unlike Wuhan university, there are many faculties and students, which is a big and excellent information management school. Yonsei only have 5~6 faculties, so we need to focus on very specific research area, not many areas. And we decided to follow the iSchools movement guidance, primally the information science directions.

Xinyuan Zhang：

What are the core courses for undergraduates, masters and doctoral students in the Department of Library and Information Science of Yonsei University? Or what core competencies are graduates supposed to achieve?

Prof. Song: 

Well, you know, each professor teaches limited courses. I strongly encouraged students to take courses like computer science, industrial engineering. And those courses are offered from other department’s help, which is much more specialized in information science. I only teach one course per semester. We have professor Moon, but he is going to retire soon. Professor Lee and professor Park, their interests are kind of interline between the library and information science. We need more technical professors to teach deep learning, machine learning and data science. So there should be our future, the department future.

Xinyuan Zhang：

Currently, what doctoral programs does Yonsei University iSchool provide? What are the graduation requirements for a doctoral student of the Department of Library and Information Science at Yonsei University?

Prof. Song: 

We have joined in the memoranda of cooperation with Indiana University, Simmons University, University of Wisconsin. And now we are looking forward to build the memoranda of sending students to those universities, they help students to get better connection and network with international scholars, I strongly hoping that China and Korea, the information school, we have more active exchange students. So if Wuhan possible, I think the exchange between us of students and professors is a good thing.

Xinyuan Zhang: 

Yes, I hope so and I really want to exchange again.

Prof. Song: 

Yeah, you can. I mean you and Qing will become the professor, so you can do that right?

Xinyuan Zhang: Yeah.

02

Research Features of the Faculty of Department of Library and Information Science

Xinyuan Zhang：

As far as I know, the Department of Library and Information Science of Yonsei University is established in the College of Liberal Arts. So what is the connection between the research in the Department of Library and Information Science of Yonsei University and the College of Liberal Arts?

Prof. Song: 

That’s a really interesting question. You know, before social science is getting popular, every discipline other than science like physics belong to Arts and Humanities. The library science was part of Arts and Humanities. It is not the right place to stay. As we are talking about a discipline revolution, we talk about deep learning and we talk about artificial intelligence. Rather than staying in the Arts and Humanities, the problem is the scope of computing does not happen. And one thing Yonsei university is trying to do, is establish a new school of computing. So I will be the first affiliated professor of AI college at Yonsei. So I copy my text mining course to the AI college of Yonsei.

Xinyuan Zhang：

Yeah, it is really a future direction. So, is there any collaboration with computer science outside of the College of Liberal Arts?

Prof. Song: 

in terms of research collaboration, I frequently collaborate with Ying Ding, and scholars from China, like Yi Bu. At Yonsei, I collaborated with the colleague major in medicine but not computer science. Because my ability is quite overlapping with professors of computer science, so there is not much synergy there.

Xinyuan Zhang：

Yeah, I know. I also think collaborate with medicine is a good future for our field.

Prof. Song: 

I am strongly optimistic that our field is quite promising. We try to expand our field by make it be multi-discipline. And we collaborated with scholars in lots of departments, Which means the key notion of force industrial revolution is conversions, multi-discipline I mean. Our field is quite fading into that directions. So as long as we are productive and as long as we do good research, our field will be promising, I believe. So I hoping that you guys could do more interesting research and become the promising professor in China. Then let us do future collaborations together.

Xinyuan Zhang：

Yonsei University is such an international school, and the teachers at Yonsei University also have overseas study background. Can you tell us about the special research directions currently carried out by the teachers in the Department of Library and Information Science of Yonsei University?

Prof. Song: 

professor Lee focus on external consulting work. Professor Park, he is doing social informatics and he is a good researcher at that area. Professor Moon is good at information retrieval,  ,his retire is coming soon, so he is record his academic career and that why we are looking for new junior professor who can bring in fresh air into our department.

Xinyuan Zhang：

I am very curious about your scientific research project experience while working in the Department of Library and Information Science of Yonsei University, because scientific research projects are an important economic guarantee for scientific research output. As far as you know, what sub-fields are the focus of South Korea’s current research funding for LIS research?

Prof. Song: 

Our major research funding source is NRF, national research foundation of Korea. And also I have several technical company project that support my research like Sumsung, Hyundai. But NRF is the main source.

03

The Interdisciplinary Research and Education in the Yonsei University

Xinyuan Zhang：

Not only does the library and information science exhibit an obvious interdisciplinary feature, disciplines such as medicine and finance also have absorbed knowledge from other domains such as computer science and management science. Interdisciplinary research has become a mainstream trend in today’s scientific research. Could you please tell us something about the construction and education of interdiscipline in Yonsei University?

Prof. Song: 

Well, information science as I said before is nature as multi-discipline or interdisciplinary. So we are communicating and collaborating with lots of different domains. My case is medicine and social science like politics, economics, business or domains whoever are looking for methodology like data analytics. Those are subject domain we collaborate a lot. And also very low level development of the collaborate with computer science or artificial intelligence college of Yonsei. Many social science departments want to work with us.

04

Current Research Areas of Prof. Min Song

Xinyuan Zhang：

We find you have such wide research interests. According to your literature themes, your research involves many hotspots such as scientometrics, text mining, biomedical informatics, deep learning, and sociomics. So recently, what are your most concerned research topics and methods?

Prof. Song: 

one major area is the Informetrics. I apply text mining and AI technic for informetrics and I keep collaborating with you and Qing at this point. And another area is that I want to find new target drug that can help curing some diseases like the Covid-19 case. At this point, I collaborate heavily with professor Ying Ding. Another area is social media mining.

Xinyuan Zhang：

Your work on research themes such as entitymetrics and sociomics have been recognized as very advanced in the LIS research, and you are such an outstanding creative talent. Could you please talk about how you expand your research field? Is there any close connection between your research themes?

Prof. Song: 

I want to discover some major phenomenon or major pattern why and how people influence others in terms of their academic activities, like citation analysis is a traditional method. I want to examining the phenomenon in a deep level. To do this, you know that traditional bibliometric analysis cannot reveal this kind of pattern. So we need more sophisticated techniques like your guys work with me. That’s my interest expanding my research.

Xinyuan Zhang：

The reform of information technology has brought in fresh blood to the research methods of library and information science. Global researchers in the LIS field are also constantly learning various information analysis techniques. We believe you are a pioneer at this point. Based on your research experience, could you please talk about how researchers with LIS background could learn information processing technologies such as big data analysis and deep learning?

Prof. Song: 

it is difficult. because you know that the technology moving really fast. The change and development spread fast. It means whoever want to use one kind of new technology into his research area is hard. Because the field barrier is very high. Correctly understanding the technical is one thing, how to apply the technology into the research area is another thing. There is I believe the high barrier. So what we need do is the curriculum, lab information science curriculum. We need to hire more technical professors. So you know in our Phd program, students must learn some basic skills in training base. Then they could apply more technical applications to their research questions. So I believe the curriculum revolution is an important way.

Xinyuan Zhang：

You have designed and developed a powerful text mining tool, PKDE4J 2.0. This tool can realize the functions of syntax segmentation, named entity recognition, relationship extraction, event recognition of PubMed abstracts and PubMed central full text, which is helpful for the development of entitymetrics research. We are very interested in PDKE4J2.0. Would you like to share us the latest research progress on PKDE4J2.0? And how is its applicability to multilingual document resources?

Prof. Song:

It is called MELKE now, medical latent knowledge extractor. And now we switched the language into python. 

Xinyuan Zhang:

Can MELKE now be applied into Chinese documents?

Prof. Song:

aha, now it only for English. Because you know that Chinese segmentation is not easy for me. But in the future, if you guys could provide Chinese relation extraction, it is possible for me to expand Chinese function parts. Because now I only have English TensorFlow module in which there are only NER module in English. But if there are relation and entity extraction module of Chinese, I am really happy to incorporate them into MELKE.

Xinyuan Zhang：

Can you tell us more about the TSMM lab you are in? Are the enrolled students also have different discipline background?

Prof. Song: 

Yes. Not only in LIS background. I have students from social science, engineering. At this time, I have a new international student from Indonesia. I have two exchange students from wuhan university and Nanjing University of Science & Technology.

Xinyuan Zhang: 

So, is there any students with the medical backgrounds?

Prof. Song: 

yes, I have some students studied lab science with the direction of biomedical major. It is interesting.

05

Changes on the Communication between iSchools and LIS Research Because of COVID-19

Xinyuan Zhang：

Although South Korea and China share a large number of international students exchanges every year, there are not many international students and visiting scholars focusing on the LIS. However, I have noticed that since the outbreak of the Covid-19 epidemic, the exchanges of visiting scholars between China and South Korea have become more frequent. What kind of impact do you think it will bring to the development of LIS disciplines in China and South Korea?

Prof. Song: 

I think it is a good movement. Because the location of South Korea and China is very close. I believe that our future scientific direction is quite similar. And there are lots of good opportunities between ischools in China and ischools in Korea. Exchange students like you is a good example. Qing is a good example of international students. And I really hope more collaboration with scholars from China.

Xinyuan Zhang:

Nowadays, global scientific researchers are contributing to the fight against Covid-19 epidemic, Since you are highly accomplished in the field of bioinformatics, can you talk about in which aspects the research work in the LIS field can contribute to overcoming the epidemic?

Prof. Song: 

That’s hard question. My personal goal is to overcome the Covid-19, what kind of mechanism in our body to become infected by Covid-19. There is any other compound nature help us to overcome Covid-19. This kind of research as the information scientist like Don R. Swanson, who provide kinds of solution by Literature Based Discovery (LBD). But other information scientists they probably give some solutions for epidemic like information exchange and inequality of information sharing since epidemic. I think we have many good goals as information scientist to help overcome Covid-19 epidemic.

Xinyuan Zhang: yes. You really did a good example for us.

Xinyuan Zhang：

That’s all. thank you for your time.

Prof. Song: 

You're welcome. Wish you all the best!

制版编辑 | 卢慧质

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