Associate Professor Kate McDowell will deliver two keynotes on library data storytelling this month. 

Professor Jingrui He has been recognized as a 2023 Distinguished Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world's largest educational and scientific computing society. The 2023 inductees are longstanding ACM members who were selected by their peers for work that has advanced computing, fostered innovation across various fields, and improved computer science education. 

Professor Jingrui He has been awarded a two-year, $600,000 grant from the IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute to improve modeling climate change and its impact across multiple application domains. He and a team of researchers from the University of Illinois and IBM will build Climate Runtime, a computational framework integrating cutting-edge capabilities from climate foundation models and multimodal fusion. This framework will allow for accurate prediction and quantification of weather and climate events and their impact in areas such as finance and agriculture.

A new study by PhD student Kyrie Zhixuan Zhou and Assistant Professor Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo has uncovered the existence of gender bias in Large Language Models (LLMs) in the U.S. and China. The researchers examined public discussion about this topic on the social media platforms Twitter (now X) and Weibo, finding reports of gender bias in the LLMs ChatGPT and Ernie, China's ChatGPT-equivalent.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Ismini Lourentzou will join the faculty as an assistant professor in January 2024. She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and director of the Perception and LANguage (PLAN) Lab at Virginia Tech.

Associate Professor Emily Knox has been inducted as an Illinois Library Luminary. The Illinois Library Luminary Program, an initiative of the Illinois Library Association, recognizes those who have made a significant contribution to Illinois libraries. Knox's commitment to intellectual freedom and to shaping the next generation of librarians has touched every library in Illinois.

Assistant Professor Travis Wagner is collaborating on a project that explores how library and information science research and medical library partnerships can inform lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and asexual (LGBTQIA+) community health workers. The research aims to address the problem of health disparities among LGBTQIA+ populations. 

iSchool faculty, staff, and students will present their research at the 37^th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023), which will be held from December 10-16 in New Orleans, Louisiana. NeurIPS is one of the most prestigious and competitive international conferences in machine learning and computational neuroscience.

Associate Professor Carol Tilley had an unexpected citation in her favorite medium—comic books! Dav Pilkey, author and illustrator of a number of bestselling and award-winning children’s books, including the popular Captain Underpants series, depicts Tilley's research on psychiatrist Fredric Wertham in his newest comic, Cat Kid Comic Club Influencers.

iSchool faculty, staff, and students presented their research at the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) annual conference, which was held from November 8-11 in Honolulu, Hawaii. The society is an international, nonprofit association that fosters interdisciplinary scholarship in social studies of science, technology, and medicine.