A paper from Professor Dong Wang's Social Sensing & Intelligence Lab received the Best Dataset Paper Award at the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) held in May 2026 in Los Angeles, California. According to Wang, the paper was accepted in the first review round, which had an acceptance rate of 4.7 percent (14 of 298 submissions). 

Associate Professor Rachel Adler and Informatics PhD student Olive Wang will present their work at the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education Conference on Research on Equity and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology (RESPECT), which will be held in Chicago this week.

PhD students Ramazan Yener, Eryue Xu, and Mubarak Raji presented their research this week at the 2026 USENIX Conference on Privacy Engineering Practice and Respect (PEPR) in Santa Clara, California. PEPR is focused on designing and building products and systems with privacy and respect for their users and the societies in which they operate. The students received USENIX grants covering their conference registration and providing travel support to attend the conference. 

Assistant Professors Ismini Lourentzou and Yaoyao Liu, along with students from their labs, will present their research at the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), held in Denver, Colorado, from June 3–7. CVPR is the flagship annual meeting of IEEE/CVF and PAMI-TC, where researchers present their latest advances in computer vision, pattern recognition, machine learning, robotics, and artificial intelligence, both in theory and practice. 

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.

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.

The Association for Preservation Technology (APT) International has named Informatics PhD student Sepehr Vaez Afshar as a 2026 Student Scholar. Established in 1985, the APT Student Scholarship annually recognizes ten students worldwide whose work advances preservation technology through innovative and impactful approaches.

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.

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.