School of Information Sciences

Schneider to present research at argumentation conference

Jodi Schneider
Jodi Schneider, Affiliate Associate Professor

Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider will discuss her medical informatics research at the 9th Conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation, which will be held July 3-6 at the University of Amsterdam. The conference brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines who are working in the field of argumentation theory. 

Schneider will give two talks during a session focusing on argumentation in health. She will present "Innovations in Reasoning About Health: The Case of the Randomized Controlled Trial," which was coauthored by Sally Jackson, a professor of communication at Illinois. The researchers' recent work introduces the concept of a "warranting device" to analyze innovations in drawing conclusions.

"One example of a warranting device is the Randomized Controlled Trial, or RCT," said Schneider. "Now it's considered the 'gold standard' for reasoning about medical treatments. But that wasn't always the case. RCT was invented not very long ago, and experts were still arguing about whether to apply it in medical science as recently as the 1950's. Specialized fields like medicine are continually innovating, and technology impacts the innovations. Inferential statistics were vital in the rise of RCT; these days new online coordinating platforms and big data methods are enabling new kinds of clinical trials."

Her second talk will be "Modeling Alzheimer's Disease Research Claims, Evidence, and Arguments from a Biology Research Paper," which was coauthored by Novejot Sandhu, a molecular and cellular biology undergraduate who worked with Schneider in a series of independent study classes. Their paper presents a case study of the arguments in a single high profile paper on Alzheimer's disease research. In the future, Schneider's lab will investigate automatic argumentation mining for experimental biology research papers.

Schneider also will chair a "Rhetorical Issues" panel at the conference.

Schneider studies science of science through the lens of arguments, evidence, and persuasion. She is developing linked data (ontologies, metadata, Semantic Web) approaches to manage scientific evidence. She holds a PhD in informatics from the National University of Ireland, Galway. Prior to joining the iSchool in 2016, Schneider served as a postdoctoral scholar at the National Library of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh, and INRIA, the national French Computer Science Research Institute. 

Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

iSchool researchers present at CSCW 2025

Several faculty, students, and recent grads will present their research at the 28th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2025), which will be held October 18–22 in Bergen, Norway. The online portion of the conference will be held on October 10. 

iSchool faculty and staff present at AISLE annual conference

Join the iSchool for the Association of Illinois School Library Educators (AISLE) annual conference, held October 5–7 at the I Hotel and Conference Center in Champaign, Illinois. The theme for the conference is “Libraries Build Connections.”

Downie appointed executive associate dean

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Professor J. Stephen Downie has been appointed executive associate dean. In this role, he will work closely with Interim Dean Emily Knox to realize the iSchool's strategic goals and objectives. He also will provide leadership for the internal administration of the School, coordinate the work of associate deans and assigned staff, and facilitate faculty affairs.

Stephen Downie

Join the iSchool at the 2025 ALISE annual conference

Join iSchool faculty, staff, and students for the annual conference of the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE), which will take place from October 6–8 in Kansas City, Missouri. The theme of the 2025 conference is "Decolonising Pedagogies: Agency, Identity, Practices."

School of Information Sciences

501 E. Daniel St.

MC-493

Champaign, IL

61820-6211

Voice: (217) 333-3280

Fax: (217) 244-3302

Email: ischool@illinois.edu

Back to top