Huang awarded Linowes Fellowship

Yun Huang
Yun Huang, Associate Professor

Associate Professor Yun Huang has been named a 2024-2025 Linowes Fellow by the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Illinois. The fellowship "provides exceptionally promising tenure-stream faculty with opportunities for innovation and discovery using the Cline Center's data holdings and/or analytic tools."

Huang will work on her project, "Designing for Clarity: Improving Interpretation of Police Use of Force Data." She will use the Cline Center's SPOTLITE (Systematic Policing Oversight Through Lethal-force Incident Tracking Environment) dataset, which allows researchers to search for incidents in which police use firearms or other forms of force resulting in death and visualize patterns of such incidents. For the project, Huang will identify factors that need to be included in the SPOTLITE dashboard so that various stakeholders—including the general public, journalists, law enforcement agencies, and educators—can better interpret the information. She will explore effective interaction designs for SPOTLITE, with the goals of enhancing public understanding and trust and promoting transparency and accountability in law enforcement.

"I have been working on exploring how different contextual factors affect people's incident reporting behavior and collaborating with local police agencies for more than ten years," said Huang. "This project will continue in this vein by identifying a wide range of contextual factors involved in police use of lethal force incidents."

Huang specializes in human-AI interaction and social computing. She is passionate about developing systems that foster collaborative innovation between humans and AI, whether it is to conceive new services or enhance existing ones. Her work is sponsored by government agencies such as the National Science Foundation, Institute of Museum and Library Services, and Administration for Community Living, as well as companies such as OpenAI, Google, and IBM. Huang received her PhD from the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine.

Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

Spectrum Scholar Spotlight: Dalia Ortiz Pon

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 Dalia Ortiz Pon earned her bachelor's degree in Latina/Latino studies from San Francisco State University. 

Dalia Ortiz Pon

Debnath datafies "The Bulletin"

MSIM student Tan Debnath, whose interests span data mining, statistical modeling, text mining, and digital humanities, joined the Center for Children's books as a research assistant. He was tasked with building curation processes that would datafy seventy-five years' worth of archival issues of The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, one of the nation's leading children's book review journals.

Tan Debnath stands casually with his hands in his pockets and smiles broadly at the camera. It's a sunny day

iSchool undergraduates selected as 2025 Community-Academic Scholars

The Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Institute (IHSI) has selected BSIS student Dhanvi Puttur and BSIS+DS student Lara Terpetschnig as 2025 Community-Academic Scholars. Representing nineteen majors and nine minors in eight colleges and schools at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and two additional universities, the eighteen scholars in this cohort encompass diverse fields of study, from community health to graphic design to statistics. 

BSIS+DS student Lara Terpetschnig and BSIS student Dhanvi Puttur

He receives Amazon Research Award to improve monitoring of Earth’s ecosystem

A new project led by Professor Jingrui He aims to help scientists monitor disruptions to the Earth’s ecosystem, such as climate change. She recently received support for her work through an Amazon Research Award, which includes $60,000 in cash and an additional $40,000 in Amazon Web Services (AWS) credits.

Jingrui He

Scholarship provides validation, motivation for Martinez

BSIS+DS student Fabian Martinez chose his major because he wanted to learn how to help people understand and interpret data and information. While his immediate plans include finding a job in data analytics, business analytics, consulting, or product management, his ultimate goal is "to create meaningful relationships and help make a meaningful impact in the world" in whatever way he can.

Fabian Martinez graduation