iSchool students and faculty will be well represented at this year's ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, held in Dallas from Oct. 13–16. JCDL is an international forum focused on research and practice in digital libraries, bringing together researchers and practitioners from computer science, information science, librarianship, archival and museum studies, and diverse domains including technology, medicine, social sciences, law, and the humanities.

PhD student Evan Guerra is trying to find a way, turning unstructured smell descriptions based on free-text human responses into structured text computers can understand. He is also working to predict the smell of molecules from their structure. Both projects are key tasks on the way to enable computer understanding of smell. 

MSLIS student Wendy Rein has been selected to receive the 2026 American Library Association (ALA) Century Scholarship.

iSchool researchers will present their work this week at the Engagement Scholarship Consortium's 2026 annual conference in Knoxville, Tennessee. The theme of this year's conference is "Changing Lives and Improving Society: Data-Driven Engagement and Innovation." ESC's goal is to work collaboratively to build strong university-community partnerships anchored in the rigor of scholarship and designed to help build community capacity.

Assistant Professor Jiaqi Ma has received a grant from the Amazon-Illinois Center on AI for Interactive Conversational Experiences. AICE is a collaboration between Amazon and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to develop intelligent conversational systems that demonstrate contextual understanding and emotional intelligence, allow for personalization, and can interpret non-verbal communication while being ethical and fair.

Adjunct instructor Jarrett Dapier's graphic novel, Wake Now in the Fire (Ten Speed Graphic, 2026), was selected by Book Riot as one of the best books of the first half of 2026 in both graphic novels and young adult novels categories. 

Associate Professor Yun Huang, as well as PhD students and iSchool affiliate faculty, will present their research at the 29th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2026), which will be held Oct. 10–14 in Salt Lake City, Utah. The online portion of the conference takes place Oct. 1. 

Diane Kelly, the Louis Round Wilson Distinguished Professor in the School of Data and Information Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will deliver the 2026 Otlet Lecture on Wednesday, Oct. 7. The lecture will begin at 2 p.m. in Room 126, 501 E. Daniel Street, and on Zoom. A reception will follow. Admission is open to all.

Professor and Associate Dean for Research Dong Wang and students from his Social Sensing and Intelligence Lab are presenting two papers on information integrity at the 2026 ACM Conference on Human-AI Complementarity and Alignment (HCOMP 2026). The conference takes place Sept. 27–30 in Alexandria, Virginia.

It’s been a big year for Nicky Martin (MSLIS '26). After graduating in May, he spent the summer as a junior fellow at the Library of Congress, which ended just in time for him to start a new position at the Claremont Colleges.