Senior Lecturer Sharon Comstock has been named to the first roster for the Public Library Data Alliance (PLDA) by the Chief Officers of State Library Agencies (COSLA) and the National Information Standards Organization (NISO). Representing an array of stakeholders, this group will continue the work of the COSLA's Measures that Matter initiative.

The National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes program awarded $20 million to the Center for Digital Agriculture at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) for the new Artificial Intelligence for Future Agricultural Resilience, Management, and Sustainability (AIFARMS) Institute. The program, a joint effort between the National Science Foundation (NSF) and U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture was created in response to the White House's 2019 update to the National Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Strategic Plan, which aims to provide support for AI research that focuses on impacting and improving society. iSchool Associate Professor Jingrui He is one of the researchers involved in the AIFARMS Institute.

Forty-one iSchool instructors were named in the University's List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent for Spring 2020. 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.

Inkyung Choi and David Hopping have been promoted to the position of teaching assistant professor, effective August 16, 2020. Choi and Hopping joined the iSchool in August 2019 as a lecturer and visiting lecturer, respectively.

The iSchool is pleased to announce the appointment of Jill Naiman as a teaching assistant professor. She has served as an adjunct lecturer at the School since 2018 and as a visiting scholar at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) since 2016.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Zoe LeBlanc will join the faculty as an assistant professor in August 2021. She is currently a postdoctoral associate and the Weld Fellow at the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University.

Members of Associate Professor Jingrui He's research group, the iSAIL Lab, will present their research at the 26th SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD2020), which will be held virtually August 22-27. The conference, hosted by the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD), is the premier international forum for data mining researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government to share ideas, research, and experiences.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Professor Michael Twidale will serve as interim PhD program director for one year beginning August 16. He will take over from Associate Professor Jana Diesner, who recently concluded her three-year term of service as PhD program director.

Associate Professor and Interim Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Emily Knox and Associate Professor Kyungwon Koh have received a $100,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (LG-246251-OLS-20) for their project, "Measuring the Impact and Value of Makerspaces in Public Libraries." Knox will serve as principal investigator for the one-year exploratory project, which is a partnership with Indian Trails Public Library District in Wheeling, Illinois, that was initially proposed by iSchool alumna Ryann Uden (MS ’06), the library's deputy director.

The iSchool is pleased to announce the appointment of Kevin Trainor as a senior lecturer, effective August 16. He has served as an adjunct senior lecturer at the School since 2008 and as assistant director of the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) from 2009 to 2011. In addition to teaching at the iSchool, he has taught full-time as a senior lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Information Studies.