Assistant Professor Jessie Chin and PhD student Smit Desai will present their research at the 64th International Annual Meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES), a virtual event held from October 5-9. The mission of HFES is "to advance the science and practice of designing for people in systems through knowledge exchange, collaboration, and advocacy."

Assistant Professor Elizabeth Hoiem has published a paper, "The Progress of Sugar: Consumption as Complicity in Children's Books about Slavery and Manufacturing, 1790-2015," in Children's Literature in Education (CLE). In her paper, Hoiem analyzes "production stories," a genre of books and media that teaches how everyday things are made. Since they started in the eighteenth century, children's production stories have evolved from picturebooks to TV episodes and web video series. Hoiem focuses on stories of sugar production in her paper and accompanying web resource, Production Stories.

Assistant Professor Melissa Ocepek and PhD student Jamillah Gabriel will present their research at the Information Behaviour Conference (ISIC 2020), a virtual event held from September 28-October 2. This conference is devoted to information-seeking behavior and information use, focusing this year on analytical investigations of the connection between information research and information behavior and practices.

PhD student Clair Irwin will participate in the Society for Scholarly Publishing’s 2020 Virtual Seminar, New Directions in Scholarly Publishing: Community, Collaboration, and Crisis, which will be held September 30-October 1. The seminar will explore new ways for publishers and industry leaders to support peer-reviewed research and academic publishing, especially during the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic.

Doctoral candidate Jooho Lee successfully defended her dissertation, "Using Grant Applications to Measure the Evolution of Collaborative and Non-Collaborative Research," on September 21.

PhD student Qiuyan Guo will present her research at the Flyover Comics Symposium, which will be held virtually on September 24-25. The symposium is organized by members of the comics studies communities at the University of Illinois, University of North Texas, and Michigan State University.

With Hurricane Sally threatening the Gulf Coast last week, people in its path may have felt reassured by the mobile apps that would provide them with weather alerts or notify first responders in case of an emergency. While the app users may have been willing to share their location with first responders, they might be surprised to learn that their location and other personal information could be shared with a third party or accessed after the hurricane had passed. Assistant Professor Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo and fellow researchers examine the privacy practices of popular disaster apps in the paper, "Disaster Privacy/Privacy Disaster," which was the lead article in a special issue of the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (vol. 71, issue 9)  on information privacy in the digital age.

PhD student Jack Brighton shared his expertise in audiovisual archives at the 105th Annual Meeting and Conference of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) on September 3. The theme of this year's conference, which is being held as a series of online events/webinars every Thursday and Saturday in September, is "2020—African Americans and the Vote." 

Associate Professor Masooda Bashir has received a $150,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS LG-246404-OLS-20) for her project, "Securing our Public Libraries: A Forum on Privacy and Security." The project seeks to identify the existence and absence of privacy protecting technologies (software and/or hardware) in public library systems.

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.