Associate Professor Kate McDowell has been awarded a $578,677 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS grant RE-256709-OLS-24), under the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program, which supports "developing a diverse workforce of librarians to better meet the changing learning and information needs of the American public by enhancing the training and professional development of librarians, developing faculty and library leaders, and recruiting and educating the next generation of librarians."

Members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing and Intelligence Lab, will present their research at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024), which will be held from August 11-16 in Bangkok, Thailand. ACL 2024 is the premier venue to present and discuss progress in research, development, standards, and applications of topics in natural language processing and computational linguistics.

Doctoral candidates Jenna Kim and Jaihyun Park have received 2024 Eugene Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship Awards from Beta Phi Mu, the international honor society for library and information studies. Up to six recipients are selected annually for this prestigious award, which is a national competition among doctoral students who are working on their dissertations. The amount awarded for each fellowship is $3,000.

Kyungwon Koh, associate professor and director of the Champaign-Urbana (CU) Community Fab Lab, has been awarded a $149,995 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS grant LG-256680-OLS-24). The award is part of the National Leadership Grants for Libraries program, which supports "projects that address critical needs of the library and archives fields and have the potential to advance practice in these professions to strengthen library and archival services for the American public."

iSchool faculty are studying ways to improve user experience, with a common goal of improving technology and applications for the needs of individual users. These researchers are working with diverse groups to gain feedback, and several current projects are focused on experiences for users with disabilities.

Doctoral candidate Jenna Kim successfully defended her dissertation, "Evaluating Pre-Trained Language Modeling Approaches for Author Name Disambiguation," on June 11, 2024.

Doctoral candidate Smit Desai successfully defended his dissertation, "Designing Metaphor-fluid Voice User Interfaces," on June 10.

A toolkit for public librarians can help them use data to communicate the value of their services and justify their funding needs. The Data Storytelling for Librarians Toolkit helps librarians present data in story form using narrative strategies. It was developed by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign information sciences professors.

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has announced the publication of the Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CREC) Recommended Practice (NISO RP-45-2024), which is the product of a working group made up of cross-industry stakeholders, including Associate Professor Jodi Schneider. 

Doctoral candidate Lanyu Shang successfully defended her dissertation, "A Human-Centric Artificial Intelligence Approach Towards Equality, Well-Being, and Responsibility in Sustainable Communities," on June 19.