iSchool faculty and staff will present their research at the Children's Literature Association (ChLA) annual conference, which will be held from May 28-30 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The theme of this year's conference is "Neighbors and Neighborhoods in Children's Literature, Media, and Culture."

Professor Dong Wang and PhD student Ruichen Yao will present their research at the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) 2026, which will take place May 27–29 in Los Angeles, bringing together researchers from around the world to study the intersection of social media, society, and technology. The conference is widely recognized as a premier venue for computational social science and social computing, with a highly selective acceptance process.

Assistant Professor Ismini Lourentzou has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award to develop the next generation of embodied AI agents, systems that can reason, explain, and adapt as they act in the physical world.

For the Fall 2025 semester, faculty, adjuncts, and teaching assistants who served as instructors for iSchool and Informatics courses were named to the university’s Facilitating Learning Excellence Award.

The iSchool recognized faculty and staff for their contributions to teaching and outstanding service to the School at a ceremony on May 6. Interim Dean Emily Knox presented plaques to the inaugural recipients of the Faculty Teaching Award, Adjunct Teaching Award, and Staff Excellence Award.

The iDEA-iSAIL Joint Laboratory at the University of Illinois received an Outstanding Paper Award at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2026 Logical Reasoning of Large Language Models Workshop for their paper, "RAG Over Tables: Hierarchical Memory Index, Multi-State Retrieval, and Benchmarking." Paper authors include lab members Jingrui He, professor and MSIM program director; Sirui Chen, Xinrui He, and Zihao Li, computer science PhD students; Jiaru Zou, computer science MS student; Dongqi Fu, alum; as well as Jiawei Han, professor of computer science, and Yada Zhu, IBM collaborator. Chen gave an oral presentation of the research at the workshop, which was held last month in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This award was selected out of 206 accepted papers at the workshop.

The School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has formally joined the special interest group (SIG) that leads the development of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM), an ISO standard (21127:2023) for the exchange and integration of wide-ranging scientific and scholarly documentation about the past. 

This week, Professor and Executive Associate Dean J. Stephen Downie was a guest speaker at the Herder Institute in Marburg and the University of Göttingen. Downie, who serves as co-director of the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), lectured on the HTRC's "Tools for Open Research and Computation with HathiTrust: Leveraging Intelligent Text Extraction" (TORCHLITE) project.

Professor Emeritus Chip Bruce has authored a new book exploring the relationship between education and democracy. Democratic Education: Finding Hope in Challenging Times was recently published by Peter Lang. 

The iSchool is well represented in the 19th annual Undergraduate Research Symposium, which will be held on April 30 from 9:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m. in the Illini Union. The iSchool is a Gold Sponsor of the symposium, which spotlights undergraduate research through oral and poster presentations, creative performances, and art exhibits.