Professor Jingrui He has been inducted into Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society. Sigma Xi is the international honor society of science and engineering and one of the oldest and largest scientific organizations in the world, boasting a history of service to science and society spanning over 125 years. It has a multidisciplinary membership of scientists, engineers, and scholars, and Sigma Xi chapters can be found in universities and colleges, government laboratories, and commercial research centers.

As a librarian at Kiplinger Research Library, Alex Aspiazu (MSLIS '22) loves solving historical mysteries and serving as a welcoming guide for patrons who are new to special collection libraries. When not providing a friendly presence at Kiplinger, Washington, DC residents can catch Aspiazu performing in plays at area theaters.

A paper co-authored by PhD student Muhammad Hassan and Associate Professor Masooda Bashir received the Distinguished Paper Award at the Workshop on Security and Privacy in Standardized IoT, which was held last month in San Diego, California, in conjunction with the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2026. 

This week, iSchool PhD students and faculty will present their research at the Technocracy Conference. Hosted by the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois on March 5–6, the conference will begin with a panel of graduate student papers and continue the following day with invited speakers and a keynote. All events will take place at the Levis Faculty Center on the Urbana campus. 

With topics like printmaking, weaving, and Minecraft 3D, it isn't surprising that summer camps offered by the Champaign-Urbana (CU) Community Fab Lab fill up so quickly. Throughout seven weeks this summer, the Fab Lab, a makerspace that supports campus and public community members, will hold 26 week-long camps for youth aged 10 to 15. This summer marks the tenth anniversary of the Fab Lab summer camps.

A new project led by a team of researchers from four universities aims to create and evaluate language models that represent past historical periods. The project, "Artificial Intelligence for Cultural and Historical Reasoning," was recently selected for a 2025 Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI) award from Schmidt Sciences. The $800,000 grant will be split among four institutions: Cornell University, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, The University of British Columbia, and McGill University. Professor Ted Underwood will serve as the principal investigator for the portion of the project at Illinois.

Professor and Associate Dean for Research Dong Wang and PhD student Ruohan Zong will present their research at the 19th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 26), which will be held from February 22–26 in Boise, Idaho. WSDM is a premier international conference in web search, data mining, and AI, known for its highly selective acceptance rates. This year, the acceptance rate for the main track of the conference was only 16 percent. 

Wayne A. Wiegand, the F. William Summers Professor of Library and Information Studies Emeritus at Florida State University, will deliver the 2026 Gryphon Lecture on March 4. Sponsored annually by the Center for Children's Books, the lecture features a leading scholar in the field of youth and literature, media, and culture.

A new National Science Foundation (NSF) award will support an innovative effort in the School of Information Sciences to strengthen research security by using structured role-playing games (RPG) to model the threats facing academic research environments. The project, titled "REDTEAM: Research Environment Defense Through Expert Attack Modeling," addresses a growing challenge: balancing the open, collaborative nature of academic research with increasing national security risks and sophisticated adversarial threats. 

The iSchool at Illinois is pleased to announce the publication of Library Trends 74 (3) "Data Literacy: Navigating the Shift from Hype to Reality." Guest editor and Library Trends editorial board member Ben B. Chiewphasa (MSLIS '19) uses this issue to examine the intersection of technological hype and practical reality in librarianship through the lens of data literacy.