The iSchool Alumni Association (ISAA) is seeking nominations for three distinguished awards. The awards are given annually at the iSchool alumni reception held at the American Library Association conference. The deadline for nomination is April 1, 2020.

Glen Worthey is the new associate director for research support services in the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), a collaboration between the University of Illinois, Indiana University, and the HathiTrust to enable advanced computational access to text found in the HathiTrust Digital Library. He will be based at the iSchool at Illinois.

Leep student Laura Fruhauff was on the verge of emailing her advisor to rescind her fall 2019 registration when she received notification from the iSchool that she would be receiving the Helen T. Stewart and Mildred Stewart Scholarship. During her undergraduate studies at Roosevelt University in Chicago, she sometimes worked 80 hours a week to stay in school.
 

Audrey Chapuis grew up in Texas, dreaming of working with books and living in France. Now, as director of the American Library in Paris, she is living her dream.

Associate Professor Victoria Stodden will present her reproducibility research at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting, which is billed as the world's largest general scientific gathering. The 2020 meeting, with the theme "Envisioning Tomorrow’s Earth," will take place on February 13-16 in Seattle, Washington.

Associate Professor Emily Knox has been named interim associate dean for academic affairs for the iSchool. In this role, she will provide leadership and oversight for academic programs, including program development, curriculum coordination, and continuous improvement of educational experiences. Knox most recently served as the School's first program director for the new BS/IS degree. Associate Professor Kate McDowell, who previously held the position of interim associate dean for academic affairs, stepped down to return to her teaching and research.

Members of Associate Professor Jingrui He's research group, the iSAIL Lab, will present a paper and tutorial at the thirty-fourth Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference, which will take place on February 7-12 in New York. The AAAI meeting is one of the world's leading conferences in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). The event promotes research in artificial intelligence and scientific exchange among researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines.

As baseball teams gear up for spring training this month, Jack Bales (MS '74) will begin another season of following—and researching—the Chicago Cubs, a team whose history he knows well. Bales, a reference and humanities librarian, combined his expert research skills and interest in the Cubs to author a book on the team's early history. His book, Before They Were Cubs: The Early Years of Chicago's First Professional Team, was published last spring by McFarland & Company.

PhD student Natã Barbosa worked as an intern at Airbnb in summer 2019. The internship provided the basis for his paper, "Designing for Trust: A Behavioral Framework for Sharing Economy Platforms," which was selected for The Web Conference 2020. Barbosa was recently named a 2020 Facebook Fellowship finalist.

Associate Professor Victoria Stodden will present the webcast, "Community Efforts Advancing Reproducibility and Transparency in Data- and Computationally-Enabled Research," on February 7. Her talk is part of a nine-week series of webcasts hosted by Project TIER (Teaching Integrity in Empirical Research), in which leaders in research transparency discuss their latest thinking on how to make statistical research open, reproducible, and credible. Registration for the webcast, which will take place at 12:00 p.m., is free but required to access the live stream.