Doctoral candidate Yingying Han successfully defended her dissertation, "Community Archives as Agency: Documenting Chinese American Experiences in the U.S.,” on May 28.

The iSchool is proud to have served as cohost for 28 data science scholars from Kazakhstan in the 2024-2025 academic year. The scholars were part of the Bolashak International Scholarship Program, an initiative sponsored by the Kazakhstani government to facilitate academic, scientific, and cultural exchange. 

MSIM student Tan Debnath, whose interests span data mining, statistical modeling, text mining, and digital humanities, joined the Center for Children's books as a research assistant. He was tasked with building curation processes that would datafy seventy-five years' worth of archival issues of The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, one of the nation's leading children's book review journals.

A new project led by Professor Jingrui He aims to help scientists monitor disruptions to the Earth’s ecosystem, such as climate change. She recently received support for her work through an Amazon Research Award, which includes $60,000 in cash and an additional $40,000 in Amazon Web Services (AWS) credits.

iSchool faculty and students will present their research at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2025), which will be held from April 26 to May 1 in Yokohama, Japan. 

Several iSchool undergraduate students will participate in the 18th annual Undergraduate Research Symposium. During the event, visitors will learn about undergraduate research projects through oral and poster presentations, creative performances, and art exhibits. All are welcome to attend the symposium, which will be held on April 24 from 9:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m. in the Illini Rooms and South Lounge of the Illini Union. Oral presentations will be held on the second floor of the Illini Union.

Informatics PhD student Olivia Wang won the Grand Prize at the 2025 Research Live! competition, which was held on April 8 in the Campus Instructional Facility Atrium. At the event, which is hosted by the Graduate College, thirteen finalists presented their graduate research in three minutes or less to a general audience. Wang received $500 as the Grand Prize winner.

Doctoral candidate Kyrie Zhixuan Zhou successfully defended his dissertation, "A Pragmatic and Human-centered Approach to Promoting Software Accessibility: Design, Education, Governance," on April 3.

Assistant Professor Melissa Ocepek and Assistant Professor Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo have co-edited a new book, Governing Misinformation in Everyday Knowledge Commons, which was recently published by Cambridge University Press. An open access edition of the book is available, thanks to support from the Governing Knowledge Commons Research Coordination Network (NSF 2017495). The new book explores the socio-technical realities of misinformation in a variety of online and offline everyday environments. 

Associate Professor Yun Huang, Assistant Professor Jiaqi Ma, and Assistant Professor Haohan Wang have received computing resources from the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR), a two-year pilot program led by the National Science Foundation in partnership with other federal agencies and nongovernmental partners. The goal of the pilot is to support AI-related research with particular emphasis on societal challenges. Last month, awardees presented their research at the NAIRR Pilot Annual Meeting.