iSchool researchers to present at ACM Web Conference

Dong Wang
Dong Wang, Professor

Members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing and Intelligence Lab, will present their research at the Web Conference 2024, which will be held from May 13-17 in Singapore. The Web Conference is the premier venue to present and discuss progress in research, development, standards, and applications of topics related to the Web.

Teaching Assistant Professor Yang Zhang will present the paper, "SymLearn: A Symbiotic Crowd-AI Collective Learning Framework to Web-based Healthcare Policy Adherence Assessment." SymLearn is a novel framework that combines crowdsourcing and AI to assess public adherence to healthcare policies like mask-wearing during events like COVID-19. The key innovation is establishing a mutually beneficial relationship between crowd workers and AI models. While AI rapidly analyzes social media data, humans can fix AI errors, and AI can guide humans to subtle visual details. Insights from SymLearn highlight frontiers in human-AI collective intelligence systems.

PhD student Lanyu Shang will present the paper, "MMAdapt: A Knowledge-Guided Multi-Source Multi-Class Domain Adaptive Framework for Early Health Misinformation Detection." In this paper, Shang and her collaborators propose a novel AI framework called MMAdapt that can detect misinformation related to new and emerging health issues at an early stage. MMAdapt leverages resources from well-studied health domains like cancer and COVID-19 to identify misinformation in new emergent areas like the 2022 Mpox outbreak. It can discern not just false claims, but partially misleading content containing a mixture of accurate and inaccurate statements that can be even more convincing to the public. The researchers aim to enable timely interventions by platforms and agencies when new public health issues arise. 

The primary research focus of the Social Sensing and Intelligence Lab lies in the emerging area of human-centered AI, AI for social good, and cyber-physical systems in social spaces. The lab develops interdisciplinary theories, techniques, and tools for fundamentally understanding, modeling, and evaluating human-centered computing and information (HCCI) systems, and for accurately reconstructing the correct "state of the world," both physical and social.

Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

Get to know Simit Shah, MSIM student

Simit Shah worked as a consultant for Deloitte in India before enrolling in the MSIM program to strengthen his analytical and business skills. Over the summer, he applied the knowledge gained from his iSchool coursework during an internship as a technology risk consultant at EY.

Simit Shah

New handbook offers in-depth exploration of information history

A new book co-edited by Professor Emeritus Alistair Black and Associate Professor Bonnie Mak, along with Toni Weller (De Montfort University) and Laura Skouvig (University of Copenhagen), provides a field-defining, comprehensive study of information history. The Routledge Handbook of Information History, released last month by Routledge, examines how society, politics, culture, and technology have shaped information practices over millennia. The 638-page volume features more than forty contributors from around the world.

Pila awarded Ruth Fine Memorial Student Loan

MSLIS student Nathaniel Allen (Nat) Pila has been selected as the 2025 recipient of the Ruth Fine Memorial Student Loan, awarded annually by the District of Columbia Library Association (DCLA). The award will support Pila as he begins his studies in the iSchool at the University of Illinois. 

Nathaniel Allen Pila

New grant to help Multiple Sclerosis patients manage depression

Associate Professor Jessie Chin has received a $215,000 grant from the National Multiple Sclerosis Society (NMSS grant RFA-2411-44091) for a two-year project to improve how people with multiple sclerosis (PwMS) manage depression. 

Jessie Chin

Record number of instructors ranked as excellent

Fifty-seven iSchool instructors were named in the University's List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent for Spring 2025—a record number for the School. The rankings are released every semester, and results are based on the ratings from the Instructor and Course Evaluation System (ICES) questionnaire forms maintained by Measurement and Evaluation in the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning. Only those instructors who administered ICES at least once during the semester and who released their data for publication are included in the list. 

The double arched wooden doors at the entrance of the iSchool, a brick building at 501 E Daniel