Teaching Assistant Professor Jill Naiman has received a Fiddler Innovation Faculty Fellowship from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). The fellowship is part of a $2 million endowment from Jerry Fiddler and Melissa Alden to the University of Illinois in support of the Emerging Digital Research and Education in Arts Media (eDream) Institute at NCSA.

Assistant Professor Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo will present her research at The Research Conference on Communications, Information, and Internet Policy (TPRC), which will be held virtually on February 17-19. TPRC's mission is to promote "interdisciplinary thinking on current and emerging issues in communications and the Internet by disseminating and discussing new research relevant to policy questions in the U.S. and around the world."

Anita Say Chan, associate professor in the iSchool and the Department of Media and Cinema Studies, will share her expertise with campus as the Provost Fellow for International Affairs and Global Strategies for the 2020-2021 academic year. The Provost Fellows Program provides selected Illinois faculty with academic leadership experience in key campus administrative roles. Fellows participate in mentoring and learning opportunities, collaborate with colleagues in the Provost’s and Chancellor's Offices and across campus, and assume leadership roles on critical campus strategic initiatives and projects.

Associate Professor Jingrui He will present her research at the International Workshop on Deep Learning on Graphs, which will be held in conjunction with the 35th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI'21) on February 2-9. The one-day workshop brings together academic researchers and industrial practitioners from different backgrounds to investigate new approaches and methods at the intersection of Graph Neural Networks and real-world applications.

The School of Information Sciences is pleased to announce the appointment of Clara M. Chu and Jaya Raju as coeditors-in-chief of its quarterly journal Library Trends, effective February 1, 2021. Their extensive editorial experience and unique combination of global, multicultural, and diverse perspectives will advance the journal's reputation as an essential tool for professional librarians and educators.

It is important for patients to understand the information they need for making health decisions, yet studies have shown that a large segment of the population lacks the health literacy to do so. Health literacy refers to capacity of people to obtain, process, and understand health information needed for making health decisions. Assistant Professor Jessie Chin addresses this topic in the paper, "Health Literacy, Processing Capacity, Illness Knowledge, and Actionable Memory for Medication Taking in Type 2 Diabetes: Cross-Sectional Analysis," which was recently published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

Associate Professor Masooda Bashir will present her privacy research at the 14th International Computers, Privacy & Data Protection Conference (CPDP2021), which will be held virtually on January 27-29. The conference brings together academics, lawyers, practitioners, policymakers, industry, and civil society to discuss emerging issues and trends in privacy and data protection. This year’s theme is "Enforcing Rights in a Changing World."

A paper coauthored by Assistant Professor Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo and Yan Shvartzshnaider (New York University) has been named a finalist for the Lee Dirks Award for Best Full Research Paper at iConference 2021. Five finalists were selected for the award, which recognizes "the most exceptional completed research paper" presented at the conference. The winner will be announced during iConference 2021, which will take place online from March 17-31.

Adjunct Assistant Professor Ellen Knutson (MS '02, PhD '08) and Quanetta Batts, director of outreach and engagement at The Ohio State University Libraries, have coauthored a chapter in the new book, Ask, Listen, Empower: Grounding Your Library Work in Community Engagement (ALA Editions, 2020). Edited by Mary Davis Fournier and Sarah Ostman, the book features contributions by leaders active in library-led community engagement and serves as both an educational resource for LIS students and a "go-to handbook" for current programming, adult services, and outreach library staff.

This semester, students in the Business Information Group (BIG), the student consultancy group associated with Associate Professor Yoo-Seong Song's Applied Business Research class (IS 514), worked with clients in the areas of facial recognition technology, digital healthcare, telemetry-based marketing automation, cybersecurity, and market entry strategy.