School of Information Sciences

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Join the iSchool at ALISE 2021

Join iSchool faculty, staff, and students for the annual conference of the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE), which will take place virtually from September 20-24. The theme of ALISE 2021 is "Crafting a Resilient Future: Leadership, Education, and Inspiration."

Wang receives grant to integrate AI and human intelligence in disaster scene assessment

In the event of a natural disaster like Hurricane Ida, artificial intelligence (AI) may be used to assess damage, using imagery reports to identify the severity of flooded areas. Using AI in disaster scene assessment has its limitations, however, and input from the people affected is needed, in order to get a better picture. A new project being led by Associate Professor Dong Wang will explore the power of human intelligence to address the failures of existing AI schemes in disaster damage assessment applications and boost the performance of the system. Wang has received a three-year, $499,786 National Science Foundation (NSF) Human-Centered Computing (HCC) grant for his new project, "DeepCrowd: A Crowd-assisted Deep Learning-based Disaster Scene Assessment System with Active Human-AI Interactions."

Dong Wang

Schneider receives NSF CAREER award

Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award to assess how to identify potential sources of bias in research and how confident we can be in the conclusions drawn from a particular body of evidence. This prestigious award is given in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization. Schneider's project, "Using Network Analysis to Assess Confidence in Research Synthesis," will be supported by a five-year, $599,963 grant from the NSF.

Jodi Schneider

Bonn and Twidale explore the concept of “informated food”

Associate Professor Maria Bonn and Professor Mike Twidale have authored a two-part concept piece on "Informated Food" in the ASIS&T publication, Information Matters. It is one of the first featured pieces in this new digital-only forum for information science, which shares research evidence and industry developments, news, and opinion with various audiences, including the public, industry professionals, educational practitioners, and policymakers.

Blake promoted to professor

Catherine Blake has been promoted to the position of professor in the School of Information Sciences, effective August 16, 2021. Blake's research seeks to accelerate science and inform policy by automatically extracting and summarizing claims reported in the scientific literature.

Catherine Blake

New UIUC course to promote understanding of cybersecurity as a career

Cyber risk is everywhere, so cyber defense abilities are naturally in high demand from employers. However, there aren't nearly enough job candidates available who have both the technical skills and the broader contextual understanding that today's cybersecurity positions require. Developing a stronger cybersecurity workforce has therefore become a national priority, and experts are looking for ways to get more students interested in this vitally important but often-misunderstood field.

Masooda Bashir

Kaushik and Wang receive best privacy paper award at SOUPS 2021

A paper authored by PhD student Smirity Kaushik and Associate Professor Yang Wang received the IAPP SOUPS Privacy Award at the 17th Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2021). The symposium, which was held August 8-10, brings together an interdisciplinary group of researchers and practitioners in human-computer interaction, security, and privacy.

Smirity Kaushik

Kilicoglu and students recognized for best system paper at SemEval-2021

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."

Halil Kilicoglu

Schneider offers recommendations to reduce spread of retracted science

According to Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider, a silver lining of the pandemic is that it has brought attention to the retraction of scientific publications. Schneider's project, "Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science: Shaping a Research and Implementation Agenda," has also brought attention to the problem of retracted research, resulting in a recent report with recommendations. The project, which was supported by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, brought together a variety of stakeholders, including funders, editors, peer reviewers, authors, and publishers.

Jodi Schneider

iSchool researchers discuss markup at Balisage

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.

School of Information Sciences

501 E. Daniel St.

MC-493

Champaign, IL

61820-6211

Voice: (217) 333-3280

Fax: (217) 244-3302

Email: ischool@illinois.edu

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