iSchool faculty and students will participate in the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) Annual Meeting, which will be held in a hybrid format—in Salt Lake City, Utah, and online—from October 30-November 2. The theme of this year's conference is "Information: Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, Justice, and Relevance." The meeting, now in its 84th year, is the premier international conference dedicated to the study of information, people, and technology in contemporary society.

People who are blind take pictures and videos and share them with others but face a unique challenge—they cannot independently review their pictures and videos to identify unnecessary private or sensitive content. A set of new algorithmic and interactive techniques being developed by researchers at the iSchool and partner institutions will empower people who are blind to independently safeguard private information in their pictures and videos. Principal investigators on the project include Associate Professor Yang Wang; Danna Gurari, assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Colorado Boulder; and Leah Findlater, associate professor in Human Centered Design & Engineering Department at the University of Washington. The collaborative project, "Novel Algorithms and Tools for Empowering People Who Are Blind to Safeguard Private Visual Content," received a four-year, $1,199,993 grant from the National Science Foundation, with the U of I team led by Wang receiving $315,931.

Assistant Professor Yun Huang and students will present their research at the 24th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2021), which will be held virtually on October 23-27. CSCW is the premier venue for experts from industry and academia to explore the technical, social, material, and theoretical challenges of designing technology to support collaborative work and life activities.

Associate Professor Ryan Cordell will deliver the keynote address at the Marbach-Weimar-Wolfenbüttel (MWW) Research Association Mid-Term Conference, which will be held virtually from Germany on October 14-15. The goal of the MWW is "to provide future-oriented impulses for collaboration in the field of humanities and cultural studies research." The association's mid-term conference will focus on engagement with material and medial losses in the archive and library.

Research conducted by Assistant Professor Jessie Chin's Adaptive Cognition and Interaction Design Lab (ACTION) provided the foundation for an article recently published in the high-impact Journal of Medical Internet Research. PhD student Tre Tomaszewski is the first author on the peer-reviewed article, "Identifying False Human Papillomavirus (HPV) Vaccine Information and Corresponding Risk Perceptions from Twitter: Advanced Predictive Models."

Sara L. Schwebel, professor and director of the Center for Children's Books, and Jocelyn Van Tuyl, professor of French at New College of Florida, have coedited a new book, Dust Off the Gold Medal: Rediscovering Children's Literature at the Newbery Centennial, which was recently published by Routledge. The Newbery Medal, the oldest and most influential children's book award in the United States, marks its 100th anniversary this year. In Dust Off the Gold Medal, Schwebel and Van Tuyl collect fourteen essays, written by contributors across the country, who examine Newbery winners that have been understudied by literary scholars.

The iSchool at Illinois is part of a multidisciplinary research team that has been awarded $750,000 to develop digital literacy tools to curb the deleterious effects of online disinformation. The grant is from the National Science Foundation's Convergence Accelerator, a program launched in 2019 that builds upon basic research and discovery to accelerate solutions toward societal impact. The research team, led by the University of Buffalo (UB), includes experts in artificial intelligence, the humanities, information science and other fields. In addition to Illinois and UB, partners include Clemson University, Lehigh University, and Northeastern University.

The iSchool at Illinois will host the 2021 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), which will be held virtually from September 27-30. JCDL is a major international forum focusing on digital libraries and associated technical, practical, and social issues. The conference will feature paper and poster presentations as well as a wide variety of tutorials and workshops offering hands-on experiences with different digital libraries and online archives.

Join iSchool faculty, staff, and students for the annual conference of the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE), which will take place virtually from September 20-24. The theme of ALISE 2021 is "Crafting a Resilient Future: Leadership, Education, and Inspiration."

In the event of a natural disaster like Hurricane Ida, artificial intelligence (AI) may be used to assess damage, using imagery reports to identify the severity of flooded areas. Using AI in disaster scene assessment has its limitations, however, and input from the people affected is needed, in order to get a better picture. A new project being led by Associate Professor Dong Wang will explore the power of human intelligence to address the failures of existing AI schemes in disaster damage assessment applications and boost the performance of the system. Wang has received a three-year, $499,786 National Science Foundation (NSF) Human-Centered Computing (HCC) grant for his new project, "DeepCrowd: A Crowd-assisted Deep Learning-based Disaster Scene Assessment System with Active Human-AI Interactions."