PhD student Jamillah Gabriel and iSchool alumna Katrina Spencer (MS/LIS ’16) gave the keynote address at the Society of American Archives Annual Conference, which was held on August 25-27 virtually and in Boston, Massachusetts.

MS/LIS online (Leep) student Jamie Flood has been awarded a 2022 Paul Evan Peters Fellowship from the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI). The fellowship, established in honor of CNI's founding director, recognizes outstanding scholarship and intellectual rigor, a commitment to civic responsibility and democratic values, and imagination. CNI annually provides two awards: one to a doctoral student in the amount of $5,000 per year, and one to a master's student in the amount of $2,500 per year.

Master's students Amina Malik and Inbar Michael have been selected to participate in the 2022-2024 Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Kaleidoscope Diversity Scholars Program. With the goal of attracting MS/LIS students from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups to careers in research libraries and archives, the Kaleidoscope Program offers financial support to scholars as well as leadership development through the ARL Annual Leadership Symposium, a formal mentoring program, career placement assistance, and a site visit to an ARL member library.

The power of information cannot be understated. It promotes discovery, drives decision-making, empowers individuals, and provides vision for the future. The School of Information Sciences (iSchool) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) uses the power of information to transform lives and society through innovative teaching, research, and engagement.

BSIS student Moira Duffy discusses her study abroad in Paris this past spring, an experience that she "wouldn't trade for anything."

Members of Associate Professor Jingrui He's research group, the iSAIL Lab, will present their research at the 28th SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD2022), which will be held from August 14-18 in Washington, D.C. The conference, hosted by the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD), is the premier international forum for data mining researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government to share ideas, research, and experiences.

Smit Malik, a second-year student in the MS/IM program, discusses his summer internship with Zwift, Inc.

iSchool faculty, staff, and students presented their research at Digital Humanities 2022, the annual conference of the International Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. The theme of this year's conference, which was held online on July 25-29, was "Responding to Asian Diversity."

Members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing Lab, presented their research at the 31st International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 25th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-ECAI 2022). The conference, which brings together AI researchers from around the world, was held in Vienna, Austria, from July 23-29.

Members of Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu's research lab won third prize, valued at $20,000, in the LitCoin Natural Language Processing (NLP) Challenge. The challenge, which was sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), brought together government, medical research communities, and data scientists to create data-driven knowledge graphs that consolidate scientific literature knowledge across domains.