School of Information Sciences

Four from the iSchool to speak at Balisage conference

Doctoral student Jacob Jett, faculty affiliate Timothy W. Cole, Research Associate Professor David Dubin, and Professor and Dean Allen H. Renear will present, “Discerning the intellectual focus of annotations,” at Balisage: The Markup Conference 2016.

Abstract: Much attention has been given to strategies for anchoring annotations in digital documents, but very little to identifying what the annotation is actually about. We may think of annotations as being about their anchors, but that is not typically the case. Two annotations may have the same anchor, such as a string of characters, but one annotation is about the sentence represented by that string and the other about the claim being made by that sentence. Identifying targets and making this information available for computational processing would provide improved support for a variety of information management tasks. We discuss this problem and explore a possible extension to the W3C Web Annotation Data Model that would help with annotation target identification.          

Balisage will be held on August 2-5 in North Bethesda, Maryland. In addition to presenting at the conference, Renear is a member of the conference advisory board.

Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

Raji invited to join UN Working Expert Group

PhD student Mubarak Raji has been invited to join the Working Expert Group on AI Governance Interoperability. This group operates under the United Nations Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies' new AI Governance for Humanity Lab. It supports the Secretary-General's High-level Advisory Body on AI by providing evidence-based analysis for the Global Dialogue on AI Governance, which will be held in July 2026 in Geneva, Switzerland.

Mubarak Raji headshot

Faculty and staff recognized with inaugural iSchool awards

The iSchool recognized faculty and staff for their contributions to teaching and outstanding service to the School at a ceremony on May 6. Interim Dean Emily Knox presented plaques to the inaugural recipients of the Faculty Teaching Award, Adjunct Teaching Award, and Staff Excellence Award.

Paper by He's lab recognized at ICLR 2026 workshop

The iDEA-iSAIL Joint Laboratory at the University of Illinois received an Outstanding Paper Award at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2026 Logical Reasoning of Large Language Models Workshop for their paper, "RAG Over Tables: Hierarchical Memory Index, Multi-State Retrieval, and Benchmarking." Paper authors include lab members Jingrui He, professor and MSIM program director; Sirui Chen, Xinrui He, and Zihao Li, computer science PhD students; Jiaru Zou, computer science MS student; Dongqi Fu, alum; as well as Jiawei Han, professor of computer science, and Yada Zhu, IBM collaborator. Chen gave an oral presentation of the research at the workshop, which was held last month in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This award was selected out of 206 accepted papers at the workshop.

Jingrui He

iSchool to shape development of cultural heritage documentation standards

The School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has formally joined the special interest group (SIG) that leads the development of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM), an ISO standard (21127:2023) for the exchange and integration of wide-ranging scientific and scholarly documentation about the past. 

Nicola Carboni

School of Information Sciences

501 E. Daniel St.

MC-493

Champaign, IL

61820-6211

Voice: (217) 333-3280

Email: ischool@illinois.edu

Back to top