A new book edited by Associate Professor Sarah Park Dahlen and Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, associate professor in the University of Michigan's School of Education, has received a starred review from School Library Journal. In Harry Potter and the Other: Race, Justice, and Difference in the Wizarding World (University Press of Mississippi, 2022), Dahlen and Thomas examine how the original Wizarding World in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series depicts diverse identities, social subjectivities, and communities.

Dean and Professor Eunice E. Santos has been named a 2023 Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The organization is the world's largest technical professional society and serves professionals involved in all aspects of the electrical, electronic, and computing fields and related areas of science and technology.
This recognition, the highest grade of membership, is bestowed on fewer than 0.1 percent of voting members each year. It is given to eminent scholars and scientists whose outstanding accomplishments in engineering, science, and technology have shown significant value to society. Santos was honored "for leadership in computational social networks."

Professor Emeritus Chip Bruce has authored a new book that examines the future of education. In Beyond the Classroom Walls: Imagining the Future of Education, from Community Schools to Communiversities, which was recently published by Rowman & Littlefield, he asks readers to adopt "a critical and comprehensive view of education" that transcends the classroom. According to Bruce, our educational systems are organized in ways that complicate the integration of online learning, schools, and learning through work.

As the calls for banning books in schools and libraries have increased exponentially in recent years, so have the requests for scholarly responses from Associate Professor Emily Knox, who has focused her career on studying intellectual freedom, information access and ethics, and book banning.

A paper coauthored by PhD student Lanyu Shang and members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing and Intelligence Lab, received the best paper award in the research track during the 2022 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2022).

Each year, the Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab hosts thousands of diverse visitors, prompting makers, educators, and researchers across campus and local communities to collaborate as they share the vision of inspiring creativity and discovery through dynamic learning.

Members of Associate Professor Jingrui He's research group, the iSAIL Lab, will present their research at the 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2022), which will be held from November 29-December 1 in New Orleans, Louisiana, and also virtually. NeurIPS is one of the most prestigious and competitive international conferences in machine learning and computational neuroscience.  

Professor Emeritus Dan Schiller has authored a new book on the progression of telecommunications systems in the United States. In Crossed Wires: The Conflicted History of U.S. Telecommunications from the Post Office to the Internet, which will be released by Oxford University Press in February 2023, Schiller draws on archival documents to argue that it was not technology but political economy that drove the evolution of the telecommunications industry.

J. Stephen Downie, iSchool professor and co-director of the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), and Glen Layne-Worthey, associate director for HTRC Research Support Services, along with partners in the University of Illinois Library, have been awarded $17,456 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Office of Digital Humanities. The team will contribute to the University of Kansas project, "Building Literacy and Curating (Critical Cultural) Knowledge in Digital Humanities (BLACK DH)."

Members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing and Intelligence Lab, will present their research at the 25th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2022) and the 2022 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2022).