The iSchool is pleased to announce that five of the eighteen students selected to participate in the 2021-2023 Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Kaleidoscope Diversity Scholars Program are from the University of Illinois. With the goal of attracting MS/LIS students from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups to careers in research libraries and archives, the Kaleidoscope Program offers financial support to scholars as well as leadership development through the ARL Annual Leadership Symposium, a formal mentoring program, career placement assistance, and a site visit to an ARL member library.

A paper by Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu and Informatics PhD students Haoyang Liu and Janina Sarol received the Best System Paper Award at the 15th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2021). SemEval, which was held on August 5-6, is a series of natural language processing (NLP) research workshops whose mission is "to advance the current state of the art in semantic analysis and to help create high-quality annotated datasets in a range of increasingly challenging problems in natural language semantics."

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois offers a variety of summer programs that provide undergraduates with the opportunity to address fundamental challenges in high-performance computing, data analysis, visualization, cybersecurity, and other areas of interest. This summer, interns participated and contributed to various interdisciplinary projects at NCSA involving high-performance computing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. BS/IS student Shriya Srikanth participated in the NCSA's Students Pushing INnovation (SPIN) program.

MS/LIS Leep students Jacqueline Mann, Abigail Mastin, and Kate Swope have been selected to receive scholarships from the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI). The scholarship provides financial assistance to current employees of CARLI Governing Member Libraries pursuing graduate studies leading to a master’s degree in library and information science at the University of Illinois. CARLI provides library services and support to 128 Illinois public universities, community colleges, private colleges and universities, and special libraries.

iSchool researchers presented their work at Balisage, an annual conference devoted to the theory and practice of descriptive markup and related technologies for structuring and managing information. The conference, which attracts markup practitioners and theoreticians worldwide, was held virtually from August 2-6.

This summer, BS/IS student Christopher Dowd had the opportunity to put what he learned in his iSchool classes into action as a data and analytics intern at Discover. He found out about the company's summer undergraduate internship program when Discover Campus Recruiting contacted him through Handshake.

PhD students Jessica Cheng and Lo Lee have been awarded Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Fellowships from the Beta Phi Mu Honor Society. The $3,000 fellowship supports students who are working on their dissertations in library and information science, information studies, informatics, or a related field.

MS/LIS student Emily Zerrenner recently completed a ten-week internship as a Library of Congress Junior Fellow. This competitive program provides students with the opportunity to explore digital initiatives and increase access to the institution’s collections while working under the direction of library curators and specialists in various divisions. For her project, Zerrenner researched audience engagement for LC Labs, a directorate housed within the Office of the Chief Information Officer at the Library of Congress.

PhD student Smit Desai will discuss his research with Assistant Professor Jessie Chin at the ACM Conversational User Interfaces conference (CUI 2021), which will be held virtually from July 27-29. The goal of the conference is "to further develop a collaborative community around human-computer interaction issues in speech and language technology, with a specific interest in theory-based and applied scientific issues in the field of speech and text-based conversational user interfaces."

Doctoral candidate Shadi Rezapour successfully defended her dissertation, "From User-generated Text to Insight; Context-aware Measurement of Social Impacts and Interactions Using Natural Language Processing," on July 20. Her committee included Associate Professor Jana Diesner (chair); Professor Ted Underwood; Roxana Girju, professor of linguistics; and Karrie Karahalios, professor of computer science.