A new project led by Associate Professor Kate McDowell and Assistant Professor Matthew Turk will help libraries tell data stories that connect with their audiences. Their project, "Data Storytelling Toolkit for Librarians," has received a two-year, $99,330 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS grant RE-250094-OLS-21), under the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program, which supports innovative research by untenured, tenure-track faculty.

David Charles has joined the iSchool as a specialized faculty member. He holds over fifteen years of industry experience in the areas of digital transformation, innovation culture and strategy, business and people analytics, and change management.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Brandon Batzloff will join the faculty as a teaching assistant professor. Batzloff, who holds a PhD in cognitive and information sciences from the University of California Merced, conducts research on social systems dynamics at multiple scales, from decision making in individuals to group interactions, and applies this research to real-world projects.

The iSchool is proud to announce the promotions of Yun Huang and Jodi Schneider to associate professor with indefinite tenure. Their new appointments became effective August 16, 2022.

Students often have difficulty estimating how well they know a topic, which can lead to inefficient learning or suboptimal educational outcomes. A new project led by Associate Professor Dong Wang and Assistant Professor Nigel Bosch aims to improve students' ability to estimate their knowledge using artificial intelligence (AI) methods. The researchers were recently awarded a three-year, $850,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for their project, "A Metacognitive Calibration Intervention Powered by Fair and Private Machine Learning."

The iSchool is pleased to announce the appointment of Renee Hendricks as a teaching assistant professor. She has served as an adjunct lecturer in the iSchool, teaching the Methods of Data Science (IS 517) course online.

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.

A new study examines how Americans acquired food at various points during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how those activities changed over time as case numbers fluctuated and vaccines became available.

Library makerspaces offer community members the opportunity to tinker, design, experiment, and create with a range of technology in an informal learning space. However, because current makerspaces and maker tools are highly vision oriented, blind and visually impaired (BVI) people have limited access to these learning opportunities. A new project led by Assistant Professor JooYoung Seo and Associate Professor Kyungwon Koh, director of the CU Community Fab Lab, seeks to address this problem by creating accessible maker programs for BVI learners and developing training materials for librarians and maker professionals on accessible making. The researchers were recently awarded a three-year, $498,638 National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS grant LG-252360-OLS-22) for their project, "Promoting Computational Thinking Skills for Blind and Visually Impaired Teens Through Accessible Library Makerspaces."

The iSchool is pleased to announce the appointment of Adam Rusch as a teaching assistant professor. He was most recently employed as an eLearning specialist in the College of Education, where he helped the college shift to emergency remote learning during the coronavirus pandemic and become one of the first units on the Urbana campus to completely transition to the Canvas Learning Management System.