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.

Mads Christiansen first heard about the growing presence of social services within libraries in one of their social work classes as an undergraduate.

iSchool alumnus and New York Times bestselling author Daniel Kraus (MSLIS '05) has won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for Angel Down. Kraus, a prolific writer whose works span several genres—children's fiction, horror, science fiction, graphic novels, and comics—learned the good news last week.

PhD student Mubarak Raji has been invited to join the Working Expert Group on AI Governance Interoperability. This group operates under the United Nations Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies' new AI Governance for Humanity Lab. It supports the Secretary-General's High-level Advisory Body on AI by providing evidence-based analysis for the Global Dialogue on AI Governance, which will be held in July 2026 in Geneva, Switzerland.

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.

PhD student Gladys Kemboi has been named a recipient of the Standing Conference of Eastern, Central and Southern African Library and Information Associations (SCECSAL) Excellence Awards 2026 in the category of Young LIS Professional. This is an international award recognizing excellence in library and information science in Africa. 

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.

Adjunct Lecturer Zachary Stier has been selected for a 2026 I Love My Librarian Award. Honorees were recognized for their outstanding public service accomplishments.