A project led by the Game Studies and Design (GSD) program in Informatics has been selected to receive the Illinois Global Institute New Approaches to International Area and Global Studies grant. The project, "Extending Capacities of Area and Global Studies to Shape the Future of Emerging Technologies," is the inaugural recipient of the two-year, $30,000 award.

Doctoral candidate Si Chen successfully defended her dissertation, "Designing Ethical Emotion AI-based Learning Experience among Ability-Diverse Users," on July 30.

Associate Professor Rachel Adler, Associate Professor Kyungwon Koh, and Assistant Professor Meicen Sun are among the twenty faculty from the University of Illinois System who were selected for the 2023-2024 cohort of the Public Voices Fellowship.

The Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Institute (IHSI) at the University of Illinois has selected Associate Professor Yun Huang for the 2024-25 Emerging Research Leaders Academy (ERLA). Designed for mid-career faculty to achieve research success, the program provides vital leadership and team science training to pursue large, multi-PI grants, lead campus research initiatives, enhance their own research programs, and ultimately position Illinois for research excellence. 

Associate Professor Kate McDowell has been awarded a $578,677 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS grant RE-256709-OLS-24), under the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program, which supports "developing a diverse workforce of librarians to better meet the changing learning and information needs of the American public by enhancing the training and professional development of librarians, developing faculty and library leaders, and recruiting and educating the next generation of librarians."

Members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing and Intelligence Lab, will present their research at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024), which will be held from August 11-16 in Bangkok, Thailand. ACL 2024 is the premier venue to present and discuss progress in research, development, standards, and applications of topics in natural language processing and computational linguistics.

Doctoral candidates Jenna Kim and Jaihyun Park have received 2024 Eugene Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship Awards from Beta Phi Mu, the international honor society for library and information studies. Up to six recipients are selected annually for this prestigious award, which is a national competition among doctoral students who are working on their dissertations. The amount awarded for each fellowship is $3,000.

Kyungwon Koh, associate professor and director of the Champaign-Urbana (CU) Community Fab Lab, has been awarded a $149,995 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS grant LG-256680-OLS-24). The award is part of the National Leadership Grants for Libraries program, which supports "projects that address critical needs of the library and archives fields and have the potential to advance practice in these professions to strengthen library and archival services for the American public."

iSchool faculty are studying ways to improve user experience, with a common goal of improving technology and applications for the needs of individual users. These researchers are working with diverse groups to gain feedback, and several current projects are focused on experiences for users with disabilities.

Doctoral candidate Jenna Kim successfully defended her dissertation, "Evaluating Pre-Trained Language Modeling Approaches for Author Name Disambiguation," on June 11, 2024.