The recruitment and admissions team at the iSchool has been awarded the Promotion of Excellence Award from the Association for Graduate Enrollment Management (NAGAP). The award is presented to an individual or team that has "developed or implemented methodology demonstrating best practices, creativity, and/or innovation in graduate enrollment management that could serve as a model across the GEM [graduate enrollment management] profession." The iSchool team received this recognition for the Information Schools and Colleagues Collaborative (ISCC) Network, which was created during the pandemic when travel was restricted, limiting traditional recruitment efforts.

Forty-one iSchool instructors were named in the University's List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent for Fall 2021. The rankings are released every semester, and results are based on the Instructor and Course Evaluation System (ICES) questionnaire forms maintained by Measurement and Evaluation in the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning. Only those instructors who gave out ICES forms during the semester and who released their data for publication are included in the list.

Adjunct Lecturer Melissa A. Wong (MS/LIS '94) has been selected as the 2022 winner of the Isadore Gilbert Mudge Award, the Reference and User Services Association's highest honor.

The Community Data Clinic has announced its first cohort of Community Media, Data, and Technology (CMDT) Fellows. The new program is part of the "Reparative Data and Media Initiative: Extending Racial and Research Justice in Champaign County" project, which is funded through the University's Call to Action initiative and led by Anita Say Chan, associate professor and director of the Community Data Clinic, and Katie Shumway, director of the Community Learning Lab in the School of Social Work. The fellowships provide annual funding and technical support to community organizations in Champaign County "looking to advance promising ideas to change local communities and systems."

BS/IS student Sam Hwang is grateful to be the recipient of an iSchool scholarship. Hwang, a junior from Glenview, Illinois, decided to major in information sciences because of his interest in data science and data analytics. He is happy with his decision.

Mandi Goodsett's interest in professional development was sparked when she was an iSchool student volunteering with the Special Libraries Association (SLA). She has since become an active member of the American Library Association, serving as president of the ALA New Members Round Table and as a member of the ALA Steering Committee on Organizational Effectiveness. Goodsett was recently selected by the ALA as the 2022 Lois Ann Gregory-Wood Fellow. She will receive a stipend of $2,500 to offset the cost of attending the ALA 2022 Annual Conference in Washington, D.C. and the 2023 LibLearnX experience in New Orleans.

BS/IS student Alistair Nunn has been honored by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) as a 2021 Fiddler Innovation Undergraduate Fellow. Nunn was among seventeen undergraduates from various fields who were selected from NCSA’s SPIN, REU-INCLUSION, and Design for America programs. The fellowship, which includes a $1,500 award, recognizes contributions to research for real-world impact and solutions.

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).