Julie Owens joined the iSchool on January 8 as a senior grants and contracts coordinator. In her position, she will perform post-award administrative functions related to sponsored research projects. 

Associate Professor Kate McDowell will deliver two keynotes on library data storytelling this month. 

Professor Jingrui He has been recognized as a 2023 Distinguished Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world's largest educational and scientific computing society. The 2023 inductees are longstanding ACM members who were selected by their peers for work that has advanced computing, fostered innovation across various fields, and improved computer science education. 

The School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign seeks nominations for the 2023 Robert B. Downs Intellectual Freedom Award. The deadline for nominations is March 15, 2024. The award is cosponsored by Sage.

Emily Valentine joined the iSchool on January 6 as an operations associate. In her new role, she will support the activities of business, finance, and human resources.

Professor Jingrui He has been awarded a two-year, $600,000 grant from the IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute to improve modeling climate change and its impact across multiple application domains. He and a team of researchers from the University of Illinois and IBM will build Climate Runtime, a computational framework integrating cutting-edge capabilities from climate foundation models and multimodal fusion. This framework will allow for accurate prediction and quantification of weather and climate events and their impact in areas such as finance and agriculture.

The School of Information Sciences (iSchool) is pleased to announce the appointment of Melissa A. Wong (MSLIS '94) as editor-in-chief of its quarterly journal Library Trends, effective February 1, 2024. Her experience as a librarian, library director, author, editor, instructor, and instructional designer will advance the breadth of the journal's influence on practice and scholarship in the field of library and information science.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to learn how to recognize online deceptions and prevent the spread of elder fraud. That, in a nutshell, is the idea behind Deepcover, a free new app available for download on Apple's App Store and Google Play that aims to equip older adults with the skills they need to safely navigate the increasingly complex digital world we inhabit.

A new study by PhD student Kyrie Zhixuan Zhou and Assistant Professor Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo has uncovered the existence of gender bias in Large Language Models (LLMs) in the U.S. and China. The researchers examined public discussion about this topic on the social media platforms Twitter (now X) and Weibo, finding reports of gender bias in the LLMs ChatGPT and Ernie, China's ChatGPT-equivalent.

Seventeen iSchool master's students have been named 2023-2024 Spectrum Scholars by the American Library Association (ALA) Office for Diversity, Literacy, and Outreach Services. This Spectrum Scholar Spotlight highlights MSLIS student Andrea Serna, whoan earned her bachelor's degree in history from DePaul University in Chicago.