Professor Emeritus Chip Bruce has authored a new book that examines the future of education. In Beyond the Classroom Walls: Imagining the Future of Education, from Community Schools to Communiversities, which was recently published by Rowman & Littlefield, he asks readers to adopt "a critical and comprehensive view of education" that transcends the classroom. According to Bruce, our educational systems are organized in ways that complicate the integration of online learning, schools, and learning through work.

As the calls for banning books in schools and libraries have increased exponentially in recent years, so have the requests for scholarly responses from Associate Professor Emily Knox, who has focused her career on studying intellectual freedom, information access and ethics, and book banning.

BSIS student Jared Canty has been honored by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) as a 2022 Fiddler Innovation Undergraduate Fellow. Canty was among twenty undergraduates from various fields who were selected from NCSA's SPIN, REU-INCLUSION, and Design for America programs. The fellowship, which includes a $1,500 award, recognizes students whose research at NCSA crosses over into multiple disciplines, encouraging exploration of new topics and innovation.

BS/IS student Shannon Dwyer discusses her study abroad in Barcelona this fall, an experience that she says has been "a true test of my independence and resilience."

Doctoral candidate Linh Hoang successfully defended her dissertation, "Natural Language Processing to Support Evidence Quality Assessment of Biomedical Literature," on December 8.

It was while she was serving in the Peace Corps that Alex Brown's eyes were opened to the need for reliable access to quality information and education. She didn't realize it at the time, but this experience would one day lead her to the iSchool, where she is now a student in the MSLIS online (Leep) program.

A paper coauthored by PhD student Lanyu Shang and members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing and Intelligence Lab, received the best paper award in the research track during the 2022 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2022).

Ved Upadhyay (MS/IM '19) serves as a senior data scientist for Walmart Global Tech. He enjoys working with different teams at the company and "designing impactful data science solutions" for customers.

MS/IM student Niharika Surange wasn't always drawn to a career in data science; like many children around the world, she initially wanted to work in the same occupation as her parent. However, as Surange progressed through school, her interest in information science and technology grew. 

Each year, the Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab hosts thousands of diverse visitors, prompting makers, educators, and researchers across campus and local communities to collaborate as they share the vision of inspiring creativity and discovery through dynamic learning.