iSchool faculty and students will present their research at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2026), which will be held from April 13–17 in Barcelona, Spain. The conference, considered the most prestigious in the field of Human-Computer Interaction, attracts researchers and practitioners from around the globe.

Imagine your favorite apps had a "digital twin" of your personality that actually grew up with you. Right now, most AI systems create a static snapshot of your interests. For example, a personal shopper who keeps recommending video games just because you bought one three years ago, even though you've long since moved on to hiking and cooking. To bridge this gap, Professor Dong Wang's team at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is partnering with Snap Research to build a "Profile Agent."

Research led by Associate Professor Masooda Bashir played a central role in one of the most significant consumer privacy settlements in recent history. 

Associate Professor Sarah Park Dahlen has been selected as one of six jurors for the 2026 Kirkus Prize, given annually in the categories of fiction, nonfiction, and young readers' literature. The prize is one of the richest in the literary world, with awards of $50,000 in each category.

Assistant Professor Yaoyao Liu has been awarded a grant through the NVIDIA Academic Grant Program. NVIDIA, a world leader in accelerated computing and AI, established the program to advance academic research by providing world-class computing access and resources to researchers. Liu has received 32,000 A100 GPU-hours on Brev, an AI and machine learning platform that empowers developers to run, build, train, deploy, and scale AI models with GPU in the cloud. 

A new app developed by Associate Professor Yun Huang aims to make navigating conferences less work and more fun, so that attendees can meet others, discover fresh ideas, and "experience academic life as an exciting adventure." The app, PapersClaw.fun, will debut at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2026), which will be held from April 13-17 in Barcelona, Spain.

Assistant Professor JooYoung Seo has been selected as a Center for Advanced Study (CAS) Beckman Fellow for the 2026-2027 academic year. CAS is one of the most prestigious faculty recognition programs at the University of Illinois. Its primary mission is to identify and support the most productive and innovative faculty across all disciplines. CAS Fellows are nominated by their unit heads and selected by the Center's permanent faculty through a competitive review process, with final approval by the Board of Trustees. 

The following iSchool faculty and students will participate in iConference 2026, which will be held virtually from March 23–26 and physically from March 29–April 2 in Edinburgh, Scotland. The theme of this year's conference is "Information Literacies, Authenticity and Use: The Move Towards a Digitally Enlightened Society."

Professor Anita Say Chan's book Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future (University of California Press, 2025) has been named a finalist in the Computing and Information Sciences Category of the 2026 PROSE Awards. The annual awards bestowed by the Association of American Publishers recognize the very best in professional and scholarly publishing and celebrate works that have made significant advancements in their respective fields of study.

Professor Jingrui He has been inducted into Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society. Sigma Xi is the international honor society of science and engineering and one of the oldest and largest scientific organizations in the world, boasting a history of service to science and society spanning over 125 years. It has a multidisciplinary membership of scientists, engineers, and scholars, and Sigma Xi chapters can be found in universities and colleges, government laboratories, and commercial research centers.