School of Information Sciences

Gant leads e-government webinar series

Research Associate Professor Jon Gant will lead a series of webinars this fall designed for local government officials across the state of Illinois. Webinars will focus on e-government topics, such as best practices (September 17), technology planning (October 15), and using data and analytics (November 19). The webinars are part of the Local Government Strategies for Digital Government series, which is sponsored by the Digital Innovation Leadership Program (DILP).

Gant is an expert in e-government, geospatial information systems, strategic planning, and information systems, and serves as director of the Center for Digital Inclusion at GSLIS, which fosters inclusive and sustainable societies through research, teaching, and public engagement.

DILP is a University of Illinois partnership of the Center for Digital Inclusion, University of Illinois Extension, and the Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab, a unit of the Illinois Informatics Institute. DILP is supported with funding from the Illinois Extension & Outreach Initiative (a special partnership between Extension; the dean of the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences; and the Office of the Provost), the Illinois Informatics Institute, and GSLIS.

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New multi-institutional project to use AI to represent past historical periods

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.

Ted Underwood

Wang group to present at WSDM26

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. 

Dong Wang

New NSF award supports innovative role-playing game approach to strengthening research security in academia

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. 

Wang appointed associate dean for research

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Professor Dong Wang has been appointed associate dean for research. In this role, Wang will provide leadership in the support, integration, communication, and administration of the iSchool's research and scholarship endeavors. This includes supervising the iSchool's Research Services unit, supporting the research centers, and assisting faculty in the acquisition of research funding.

Dong Wang

Knox authors new edition of Book Banning

The second edition of Interim Dean and Professor Emily Knox's book, Book Banning in 21st Century America, was recently released by Bloomsbury. The first edition, published by Rowman & Littlefield (now Bloomsbury) in 2015, was the first monograph in the Beta Phi Mu Scholars' Series. The new edition examines 25 contemporary cases of book challenges in schools and public libraries across the United States and breaks down how and why reading practices can lead to censorship.

"Book Banning in 21st Century America" by Emily Knox

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