School of Information Sciences

iSchool researchers to present at The Web Conference 2021

iSchool researchers will present their work at The Web Conference 2021. The conference, which will be held virtually from April 12-23, will address the evolution and current state of the Web through the lens of computer science, computational social science, economics, public policy, and Web-based applications.

Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider, Associate Professor Catherine Blake, and Bioinformatics MS student Yuanxi Fu will present their paper, "Finding Keystone Citations for Constructing Validity Chains among Research Papers," at the Sci-K workshop. The paper builds on Fu & Schneider's keystone citation project and emerged from a class project in Blake's Text Mining class. In the paper, the researchers propose and evaluate "a strategy that repurposes rhetorical category classifiers for the novel application of extracting keystone citations that relate to research methods."

iSchool PhD student Haonan Wang and Computer Science PhD students Yikun Ban and Lecheng Zheng will present three papers of Associate Professor Jingrui He's research group, the iSAIL Lab. Ban will present "Local Clustering in Contextual Multi-Armed Bandits," which introduces a new bandit algorithm, LOCB for content recommendation and online advertisement; Wang will present "Controllable Gradient Item Retrieval," which solves the problem of retrieving a sequence of items with a gradual change on a certain attribute; and Zheng will present "Deep Co-Attention Network for Multi-View Subspace Learning," which provides new methodologies for social media analysis, by leveraging both the topology of the underlying social network and the content of the users' posts.

Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

Kemboi receives Knowledge Manager of the Year Award

PhD student Gladys Kemboi has been awarded the Knowledge Manager of the Year Award from CILIP, the UK's library and information association. This is an international award that recognizes an individual who has made a significant contribution and excellence in the discipline of knowledge management through their work and professionalism.

Gladys Kemboi

Benson awarded Fulbright Specialist Grant

iSchool Affiliate Professor Sara Benson, copyright librarian and associate professor at the University Library, has been awarded a Fulbright Specialist Grant. 

Sara Benson

Christine Nguyen Awarded Julia C. Blixrud Scholarship 2026

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has awarded Christine Thuy Minh Nguyen the Julia C. Blixrud Scholarship to attend the 2026 ARL President’s Institute. Christine is a master of science in library and information science (LIS) student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign specializing in digital archives and data stewardship. She currently serves as a graduate assistant in the Research Data Service Unit of the University of Illinois Library, where she has developed a strong commitment to inclusive user experience and accessible digital design by leading a project to innovate change in current technical workflows.

Christine Thuy Minh Nguyen

Rhinesmith elected to iSchools Board of Directors

Associate Professor Colin Rhinesmith has been elected to serve on the iSchools Board of Directors for 2026–2027. The board consists of six general members; Rhinesmith will serve as one of three members representing the North American region. As a member, he will assist in developing the strategic direction of the iSchools organization, which includes over 130 universities worldwide. His experience working with the iSchools includes serving as a conference reviewer for multiple iConferences and co-chairing the iSchools Community Informatics Group. 

Colin Rhinesmith

Koval Scholarship validates Mohammed's challenging academic journey

As a middle school student in Accra Newtown, Ghana, Fatihi Mohammed put his education on hold. Through renewed focus and efforts, the student has shown remarkable academic growth and is now working toward his MSLIS degree at the University of Illinois. Mohammed is receiving support for his studies through the Anna Mae Koval Scholarship Fund at the iSchool. 

Fatihi Mohammed

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