Assistant Professor Jana Diesner will moderate a panel on Natural Language Processing (NLP) at the Big Data Summit on November 10 in Champaign. The annual summit brings together experts from the University of Illinois Research Park, industry, and academia to share knowledge about big data and its business applications.

As an interaction designer/information architect at Expedia, Chris Nixon is responsible for the design, usability, and accessibility of their Things to Do line of business.

Associate Professor Bonnie Mak has been invited to share her expertise at a National Science Foundation (NSF) workshop on "Social Facets of Data Science." The workshop will examine data science as an important and growing profession that sits at the intersection of the STEM fields and the liberal and creative arts. 

Associate Professor Kathryn La Barre has been invited by the Knowledge Organization Research Group (KOrg) to work with doctoral students and faculty in the School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

The iSchool is pleased to announce the appointment of Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe (MS ’94) as editor of its quarterly journal Library Trends. Hinchliffe will begin her new role on January 1, 2017. A leader in the field of library and information science, Hinchliffe is professor and coordinator for Information Literacy Services and Instruction in the University Library

At the end of October, Professor Emeritus Dan Schiller delivered a series of lectures in China focusing on the theme, "Networks and Age of Nixon." Schiller was invited to talk as part of Peking University's Global Fellowship Program. Prior lecturers in the Global Fellowship Program include Fredric Jameson and Francis Fukuyama and, going back to its earliest years, John Dewey.

Georgeann Burch's dedication to the school library profession has earned her the 2016 Polestar Award from the Illinois School Library Media Association (ISLMA). Burch recently retired from the iSchool after serving 11 years as the K-12 program coordinator.

How does complex research take place under these circumstances? What infrastructure supports, or could support, large-scale interdisciplinary scientific research? Assistant Professor Peter Darch is investigating questions like these in collaboration with colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Center for Knowledge Infrastructures.

In the seventeenth century, Margaret Cavendish authored a work of utopian fiction that has been called one of the earliest examples of science fiction. Doctoral student Stacy Wykle thinks otherwise—and her research supports the book’s contributions to scientific discourse as well as Cavendish’s vision to reorganize the social, intellectual, and chronological realities of her day.

A new book by Sidney Berger (MS '87) offers readers a definitive glossary for understanding how books are made and how they are described in the bookselling, book collecting, and library worlds. The Dictionary of the Book: A Glossary for Book Collectors, Booksellers, Librarians and Others (published by Rowman & Littlefield) was released this month.