Associate Professor Maria Bonn, Senior Data and Policy Analyst Ben Schaap, and Teaching Assistant Professor Sharon Comstock have received a Provost's Initiative on Teaching Advancement (PITA) grant, worth $7,500, for their proposal, "Standardizing MSLIS Experiential Learning Opportunities." PITA grants support the implementation of teaching innovations and enhancements at the University of Illinois.

Sara L. Schwebel, professor and director of the Center for Children's Books, gave the opening keynote for the 26th biennial International Research Society for Children's Literature (IRSCL) 2023 Congress, which was held from August 12-16 in Santa Barbara, California. The theme of this year's conference, which attracted attendees from over thirty countries and six continents, was "Ecologies of Childhood: Children's Literature, Culture, and the Environment."

The iSchool is pleased to announce the appointment of three specialized faculty members. Craig Willis and Yang Zhang will join the School as teaching assistant professors, and Dave Mussulman will join the School as a lecturer.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Rachel Adler will join the faculty as an associate professor in August 2023. She currently serves as an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Northeastern Illinois University. 

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Travis L. Wagner will join the faculty as an assistant professor in August 2023. They currently serve as a lecturer in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland.

Associate Professor Dong Wang is the lead author of a book that introduces a new paradigm integrating edge computing, humans, and artificial intelligence (AI). Social Edge Computing: Empowering Human-Centric Edge Computing, Learning and Intelligence (Springer) is coauthored by Daniel "Yue" Zhang, research scientist at Amazon Alexa AI. 

A paper coauthored by PhD student Sullam Jeoung, Associate Professor Jana Diesner, and Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu was named Best Long Paper at TrustNLP: Third Workshop on Trustworthy Natural Language Processing, which was held in conjunction with the Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2023).

The possibilities of high-performance computing are boundless. Every day new and exciting innovations and discoveries are announced that have utilized the power of cyberinfrastructure, and such advancements that benefit all of society should also include all of society in their process. That's why the Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub (MBDH) has been working to amplify and demystify resources available to communities of persons with disabilities.

iSchool faculty, staff, and students will present their research and contribute in a number of other ways at DH2023, the annual conference of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO), on July 10-14 in Graz, Austria. The digital humanities (DH) conference is the largest event of the international DH community and unites scholars from across the globe. The theme of this year's conference is "Collaboration as Opportunity."

Office Support Specialist Dimitria Johnson has been elected president of Illinois Administrative Professionals (IAP, formerly known as The Secretariat), an organization for University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign employees in certain Civil Service classifications. She began her one-year term on July 1.