Members of Associate Professor Jingrui He's research group, the iSAIL Lab, will present a paper and tutorial at the thirty-fourth Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference, which will take place on February 7-12 in New York. The AAAI meeting is one of the world's leading conferences in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). The event promotes research in artificial intelligence and scientific exchange among researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines.

Associate Professor Victoria Stodden will present the webcast, "Community Efforts Advancing Reproducibility and Transparency in Data- and Computationally-Enabled Research," on February 7. Her talk is part of a nine-week series of webcasts hosted by Project TIER (Teaching Integrity in Empirical Research), in which leaders in research transparency discuss their latest thinking on how to make statistical research open, reproducible, and credible. Registration for the webcast, which will take place at 12:00 p.m., is free but required to access the live stream.

Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu will give an invited lecture on February 6 at the University of Kentucky Institute for Biomedical Informatics.

His talk, "Promoting Transparency in Biomedical Publications using Natural Language Processing," will focus on how biomedical language processing and text mining (bioNLP) techniques can be used to promote the rigor, reproducibility, and transparency of biomedical research.

As a Research Experience for Master's Students (REMS) Fellow at the University of Michigan School of Information last summer, MS/LIS student Dykee Gorrell worked with Oliver Haimson, assistant professor at Michigan, on a research project about trans technology design. One of the papers that resulted from their research, "Designing Trans Technology: Defining Challenges and Envisioning Community-Centered Solutions," has been accepted for the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2020). Additional coauthors and research team members include Michigan graduate students Denny Starks and Zu Weinger.

A multi-institutional $1.2M grant from the National Science Foundation will accelerate discovery and exploration of the synthetic biology design space. Professor and Associate Dean for Research J. Stephen Downie serves as a principal investigator on the project, "Synthetic Biology Knowledge Systems," which brings together researchers from the University of Illinois; University of Utah; University of California, San Diego; Virginia Commonwealth University; Worcester Polytechnic Institute; and the non-partisan and objective research organization NORC at the University of Chicago.

Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller, senior lecturer at the Australian National University, has been selected by the iSchool faculty as a research fellow for a two-year term through 2021. Research fellows are chosen because their work is relevant to the interests of the School's faculty and students. Each will give at least one lecture during their appointment.

Assistant Professor Elizabeth Hoiem explains how studying children's literature offers new perspectives on history.

For a decade, the Illinois Cyber Security Scholars Program (ICSSP) has been offering scholarships to undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Illinois in exchange for government service after graduation. The program is offered through the University's Information Trust Institute (ITI), an interdisciplinary research center addressing all aspects of information trust.

Anita Say Chan, associate professor in the iSchool and the Department of Media and Cinema Studies, is the recipient of a 2019-2020 Fiddler Innovation Faculty Fellowship from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). The Fiddler 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.

The staff at The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books (BCCB) has announced the 2019 Blue Ribbons, their choices for the best of children's and young adult literature for the year. Blue Ribbons are chosen annually by BCCB reviewers and represent what they believe to be outstanding examples of fiction, nonfiction, and picture books for youth.