The following iSchool faculty, staff, and students will participate in iConference 2022, which will be held virtually on February 28-March 4. The annual event brings together scholars, researchers, and information professionals to share insights on critical information issues. The theme of this year's conference is "Information for a Better World: Shaping the Global Future."

Associate Professor Jingrui He will be a keynote speaker at the Machine Learning on Graphs Workshop during the 15th Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) International WSDM Conference. WSDM, which will be held virtually on February 21-25, is one of the premier conferences on web-inspired research involving search and data mining.

Associate Professor Yang Wang has received a one-year, $100,000 grant from Meta for his project, "Global South Citizens' Privacy Perceptions and Management of Targeted Ads on Social Media." His doctoral students Tanusree Sharma, Smirity Kaushik, and Yaman Yu will serve as co-investigators. The goal of the project is to learn from users in the Global South, with a focus on India and Bangladesh, about their experience with targeted ads.

While traditional closed captions represent the spoken part of a video, important content may not be expressed, to the detriment of audiences who depend on captions to understand the material being presented. With the increasing reliance on videos in online learning, this becomes even more problematic. A new collaborative project being led by Assistant Professor Yun Huang will focus on explanatory captions, which give insight into a video's visual and audio content as well as the spoken word. Her project, "Advancing STEM Online Learning by Augmenting Accessibility with Explanatory Captions and AI," has received a three-year $526,006 grant (totaling $849,994 with two collaborators at Gallaudet University and University at Notre Dame) from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Assistant Professor JooYoung Seo has been selected as an Emerging Scholar by the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS), which is dedicated to the empirical investigation of learning in real-world settings and the use of technology-facilitated learning. Funded by the Wallace Foundation, the Emerging Scholars Program elevates and supports the work of scholars from marginalized and underrepresented groups whose research focuses on "addressing educational injustices through the research methodologies and/or topics under study." 

Associate Professor Jingrui He has been awarded a two-year, $149,921 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to improve the performance of deep learning models. For her project, "Weakly Supervised Graph Neural Networks," she will focus on the lack of labeled data in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), a deep learning method designed to perform inference on data described by graphs.

Cora Thomassen passed away on December 23, 2021. Thomassen earned her MS/LIS degree from the University of Illinois in 1955. She became the librarian at South Haven, Michigan, public schools, and then librarian to an extension of Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. In 1961, she accepted an assistant professor of library science position at the U of I, becoming a tenured associate professor in 1969.

Members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing Lab, will present papers at the 2021 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE BigData 2021), which will be held virtually from December 15-18.

In addition to killing insects and weeds, pesticides can be toxic to the environment and harmful to human health. A new project led by Associate Professor Dong Wang and Huichun Zhang, Frank H. Neff Professor of Civil Engineering at Case Western Reserve University, will help scientists mitigate the environmental and ecological risks of pollutants such as pesticides and develop remediation strategies for cleaner water, soil, and air. The researchers have received a three-year, $402,773 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for their project, "Machine Learning Modeling for the Reactivity of Organic Contaminants in Engineered and Natural Environments."

The iSchool has introduced a new course for undergraduate students who are interested in gaming. Social History of Games & Gaming (IS 199 SHG) is a survey of the history of gaming from the ancient world through the twentieth century and its impact on science, society, and culture. Taught by Teaching Associate Professor David Dubin, the course fulfills a general education requirement for students majoring in information sciences. It is taught in a lecture and discussion format, engaging students with the material and promoting participation.