Ian Brooks, iSchool research scientist and director of the Center for Health Informatics, and Sebastian Garcia Saiso, director of the Department of Evidence and Intelligence for Action in Health for the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), presented their preliminary social media analytics research on COVID-19 at the World Health Organization (WHO). 

PhD student Courtney Richardson will be the keynote speaker for "Storytelling with Data," a webinar hosted by LACONI (Library Administrators Conference of Northern Illinois) on April 10. The webinar will teach participants how they can interpret and communicate library information to community stakeholders using persuasive storytelling and data visualization.

MS/LIS student Dykee Gorrell has been selected to participate in the Cornell Summer School on Designing Technology for Social Impact. The program, which will be held June 15-19 at Cornell University, is designed to foster a strong cohort of underrepresented researchers working on topics related to the social impact of information technology.

Teaching Assistant Professor Martin Wolske has joined the editorial board of the Journal of Community Informatics. The journal includes scholarly articles and notes from the interdisciplinary field of Community Informatics, which involves the study and practice of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) in support of community-defined development goals.

Adjunct Lecturer Kristen Mattson will present "Information Literacy in Today's World: A Pandemic, Fake News, and Elections," on April 14 as part of the Follett Community Webinar Series. In her talk, Mattson will examine how (and why) information can be misleading and suggest strategies and resources for educators to use when teaching information.

A poster coauthored by Assistant Professor Peter Darch was a finalist for the Best Poster Award at iConference 2020, which was held virtually on March 23-27. The poster's lead author is Live Kvale, a doctoral student at Oslo Metropolitan University co-advised by Darch.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has awarded Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider a $174,981 grant for reducing the spread of retracted research. When retracted papers are cited both before and after retraction, the scientific publication network inadvertently propagates potentially faked data, fundamental errors, and unreproducible results. According to Schneider, a retracted source paper concerning a fraudulent trial of blood pressure medication is still in the top 1% of most cited articles, with 930 citations in the abstract and citation database Scopus.

Associate Professor Victoria Stodden presented her research at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine workshop, "Opportunities for Accelerating Scientific Discovery: Realizing the Potential of Advanced and Automated Workflows," which was held virtually on March 16-17. 

The following iSchool faculty, staff, and students will participate in iConference 2020, which will be held virtually on March 23-27. The annual event brings together scholars, researchers, and information professionals to share insights on critical information issues. The theme of this year's conference is "Sustainable Digital Communities."

Associate Professor Jingrui He and Arun Reddy Nelakurthi, senior engineer in machine learning research at Samsung Research America, have coauthored a new guide to user behavior modeling. Their book, Social Media Analytics for User Behavior Modeling: A Task Heterogeneity Perspective, was recently published by CRC Press.