Associate Professor Miles Efron will participate in the 39th International Conference of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR). The conference will be held July 17-21 in Pisa, Italy.

Master's student Galen Kelly has focused his studies on knowledge management and applied business research and supplemented his educational experience by working as a business research consultant. He is currently completing an internship in product strategy at U.S. Cellular and preparing to graduate this August.

At the same time that humanity shifts toward digital ways of living and working, the proportion of senior citizens among the world's population is growing. Rejecting the idea that aging is just a matter of declining minds and bodies, iSchool doctoral candidate Noah Lenstra (MS '09, CAS '11) has explored digital literacy among older adults in Champaign-Urbana using information infrastructure theory and the extended case method.

What happens when you give kids the opportunity to create their own smartphone apps? A developing interest in STEM, a boost in their critical thinking skills, and some really cool kid-created apps like "Jumpy Horses" and "Escape the World." Those two titles are among the apps being created at the Douglass Branch Library in Champaign in a free six-week program that gives children a chance to explore, play, and eventually create their own apps.

Several iSchool representatives will speak next week at Digital Humanities 2016, the annual conference of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. The event will be held in Krakow, Poland on July 11-17.

A column by Associate Professor Bonnie Mak and Julia Pollack (MS ’12) appears in the July/August 2016 issue of the Association for Computing Machinery magazine, Interactions. In their column, “On the Design of the Humanities,” Mak and Pollack introduce the design of the humanities to audiences in human-computer interaction.

A recent analysis of online conversations about President Obama’s proposed plan for tuition-free community colleges, America's College Promise, indicates that a significant number of people oppose the plan.  iSchool doctoral student Shubhanshu Mishra and researchers examined the content and civility of comments that were posted on websites during the week following Obama's announcement.

Assistant Professor Emily Knox has been elected to a three-year term on the Board of Directors of the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC). An alliance of more than fifty nonprofit organizations, NCAC promotes freedom of thought, inquiry, and expression and opposes censorship in all its forms.  

Doctoral candidate Shameem Ahmed successfully defended his dissertation, "mHealth Literacy: Characterizing People’s Ability to Use Smartphone-based Health-related Applications," on June 30.

Doctoral candidate Melissa Villa-Nicholas successfully defended her dissertation, "Latinas in Telecommunications: Intersectional Experiences in the Bell System," on June 30.