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

Pettigrew finds balance as a student-athlete

Isiah Pettigrew started wrestling in his junior year of high school in Palatine, Illinois. He advanced in the sport quickly, placing fourth in his weight class at the state wrestling tournament in his senior year. He signed on with the Illini Wrestling team in 2020 as a freshman and has been wrestling throughout his academic career, which includes earning a bachelor's degree and beginning a master's degree at the iSchool.

Isiah Pettigrew

Get to know Cadence Cordell, MSLIS student

Cadence Cordell was inspired by her undergraduate work experience to pursue a degree in library and information science. She followed in her mother’s footsteps by selecting the iSchool for her MSLIS. After completing a recent research poster presentation, she combined her scholarly pursuit with her hobby by sewing her fabric poster into a squirrel plushie.

Cadence Cordell

Recent graduate committed to making libraries accessible and inclusive

Joshua Short knows firsthand the barriers to public library access that patrons living on modest wages experience. Having grown up in a self-professed "low-income environment," Short has made it his mission to reduce these barriers, such as library fines, inadequate transportation, and limited computer literacy.

Joshua Short

Tibebu joins the School

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Haileleol Tibebu joined the faculty as a teaching assistant professor on January 1, 2025. His research and teaching interests include responsible AI, AI policy and governance, algorithmic fairness, and the intersection of technology and society.

Haileleol Tibebu

Spectrum Scholar Spotlight: Leslie Lopez

Twelve iSchool master's students were named 2024–2025 Spectrum Scholars by the American Library Association (ALA) Office for Diversity, Literacy, and Outreach Services. This “Spectrum Scholar Spotlight” series highlights the School’s scholars. MSLIS student Leslie Lopez graduated from the University of North Texas with a BA in psychology.

Leslie Lopez headshot