Associate Professor Jana Diesner will present her research on biases in data science at the Big Data Summit, which will be held virtually on November 12. The annual summit brings together experts from the University of Illinois Research Park, industry, and academia to share knowledge about big data and its business applications through panel discussions, keynote presentations, and networking opportunities. This year's summit will include sessions on machine learning, artificial intelligence, and digital transformation.

A paper coauthored by Assistant Professor Yun Huang and PhD student Si Chen received an Honorable Mention Award at the 23rd ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2020), which was held virtually on October 17-21. Approximately 1,000 papers were eligible for consideration for Best Paper awards, with the top one percent recognized as Best Papers and five percent as Honorable Mentions. Coauthors included Xinyue Chen, an undergraduate at Peking University, and Xu Wang, a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University.

Doctoral candidate DeAnza Williams successfully defended her dissertation, "BlackBoyYALit: Seeing Black Boys in 21st Century Young Adult Literature," on November 5.

Members of Associate Professor Jana Diesner's Social Computing Lab will present two posters at the 11th Annual Maritime Risk Symposium, which is being held virtually from October 26-30. The symposium, hosted by the Critical Infrastructure Resilience Institute (CIRI), will focus on maritime resilience and the impact of COVID-19 with regard to resiliency for future global upsets.

Doctoral candidate Rezvaneh (Shadi) Rezapour will present her research at the 2nd Annual Michigan Institute Consortium for Data Scientists in Training, a virtual event held from October 29-30. Rezapour is part of the Institute’s 2020 cohort, which includes researchers from 28 universities. The competitive program offers graduate students and postdocs the opportunity to participate in research talks, networking sessions, and mentoring opportunities.

The Department of Homeland Security has awarded Associate Professor Jingrui He a two-year, $319,568 grant to study how the risk of foreign influence on news media can be mitigated. Her project, "Towards a Computational Framework for Disinformation Trinity: Heterogeneity, Generation, and Explanation," will lead to a new suite of algorithms and software tools to detect, predict, generate, and understand disinformation dissemination. Hanghang Tong, associate professor of computer science at Illinois, will serve as co-principal investigator.

A paper authored by Informatics PhD student Donald Keefer and Assistant Professor Karen Wickett, "Adapting Research Process Models for the Design of Knowledge Engineering Applications," has received the Best Short Paper Award at the 2020 Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) Annual Meeting.

When retracted papers are cited both before and after retraction, the scientific publication network inadvertently propagates potentially faked data, fundamental errors, and unreproducible results. Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider is working on reducing the spread of retracted science, receiving a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for this research.

iSchool faculty presented their research at the Digital Humanities Initiative at the University of Illinois Chicago conference, "Resources and Visibility in Digital Humanities," which was held virtually on October 22-23. A collaborative effort between UIC’s Institute for the Humanities and University Library, the Digital Humanities Initiative provides technical resources for humanities scholars at UIC. Sara L. Schwebel, professor and director of The Center for Children's Books, was a keynote speaker for the conference, and Teaching Associate Professors David Dubin and Judith Pintar served on the panel, Gaming and Transmediation.

iSchool faculty and students will participate in the 83rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T), which will be held virtually from October 22-November 1. The theme of this year's conference is "Information for a Sustainable World: Addressing Society's Grand Challenges." The meeting is the premier international conference dedicated to the study of information, people, and technology in contemporary society.