Members of the iSchool community will present their research this week at the Library Research Seminar, a program of the American Library Association’s Library Research Round Table. Library Research Seminar VIII: Telling Library Stories will be held from September 16-18 at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.

iSchool faculty and students will present their research at the 10th International Conference on Computational Models of Argument (COMMA 2024), which will be held from September 18-20 in Hagen, Germany, as well as pre-conference workshops. The conference brings together researchers interested in computational models of argument and the representation of argumentation structures in natural language texts.

Jasmine Schreiber, a Leep (MSLIS online) student, has been awarded the Valerie J. Wilford Scholarship Grant for Library Education from the Illinois Library Association (ILA). The award is given to those in pursuit of education in librarianship, including classes, webinars, seminars, or conferences. 

Doctoral candidate Si Chen successfully defended her dissertation, "Designing Ethical Emotion AI-based Learning Experience among Ability-Diverse Users," on July 30.

MSIM student Peeya Thacker was honored for her internship performance at the 18th Annual Research Park Intern Awards ceremony on July 25. Thacker was named "Most Outstanding Graduate Student Intern" for her work at COUNTRY Financial DigitaLab in the University's Research Park.

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.

iSchool undergraduates Madisen LeShoure and Harshitha Vetrivel have been awarded Kathryn J. Oberdeck Social Justice Scholarships. The scholarship program, which is sponsored by the Campus Faculty Association at Illinois, awards $1,000 scholarships for undergraduate students who have demonstrated outstanding commitment to social justice in the community. 

Twelve iSchool master’s students have been named 2024-2025 Spectrum Scholars by the American Library Association (ALA) Office for Diversity, Literacy, and Outreach Services. Since 1997, the Spectrum Scholarship Program has promoted diversity among graduate-level students pursuing degrees in library and information studies through ALA-accredited programs.

PhD student Puranjani Das has been selected as a recipient of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) SIG CMR Student Membership Award for the 2024-2025 academic year. She will receive a complimentary one-year membership in both ASIS&T and SIG CMR, a special interest group focused on classification and metadata research.