Doctoral candidate Si Chen successfully defended her dissertation, "Designing Ethical Emotion AI-based Learning Experience among Ability-Diverse Users," on July 30.

MSIM student Peeya Thacker was honored for her internship performance at the 18th Annual Research Park Intern Awards ceremony on July 25. Thacker was named "Most Outstanding Graduate Student Intern" for her work at COUNTRY Financial DigitaLab in the University's Research Park.

Members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing and Intelligence Lab, will present their research at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024), which will be held from August 11-16 in Bangkok, Thailand. ACL 2024 is the premier venue to present and discuss progress in research, development, standards, and applications of topics in natural language processing and computational linguistics.

Doctoral candidates Jenna Kim and Jaihyun Park have received 2024 Eugene Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship Awards from Beta Phi Mu, the international honor society for library and information studies. Up to six recipients are selected annually for this prestigious award, which is a national competition among doctoral students who are working on their dissertations. The amount awarded for each fellowship is $3,000.

iSchool undergraduates Madisen LeShoure and Harshitha Vetrivel have been awarded Kathryn J. Oberdeck Social Justice Scholarships. The scholarship program, which is sponsored by the Campus Faculty Association at Illinois, awards $1,000 scholarships for undergraduate students who have demonstrated outstanding commitment to social justice in the community. 

Twelve iSchool master’s students have been named 2024-2025 Spectrum Scholars by the American Library Association (ALA) Office for Diversity, Literacy, and Outreach Services. Since 1997, the Spectrum Scholarship Program has promoted diversity among graduate-level students pursuing degrees in library and information studies through ALA-accredited programs.

PhD student Puranjani Das has been selected as a recipient of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) SIG CMR Student Membership Award for the 2024-2025 academic year. She will receive a complimentary one-year membership in both ASIS&T and SIG CMR, a special interest group focused on classification and metadata research.

Doctoral candidate Jenna Kim successfully defended her dissertation, "Evaluating Pre-Trained Language Modeling Approaches for Author Name Disambiguation," on June 11, 2024.

Doctoral candidate Smit Desai successfully defended his dissertation, "Designing Metaphor-fluid Voice User Interfaces," on June 10.

Last month, Michael Ferrer showed appreciation for one of his MSIM instructors in a unique way—by inviting him for an insider’s look at his work as a reservist in the Illinois Army National Guard. For the ILARNG BOSS Lift, which took place on June 18 at Camp Atterbury, Indiana, Ferrer selected Michael Wonderlich, iSchool adjunct lecturer and senior associate director of business intelligence and enterprise architecture for Administrative Information Technology Services (AITS) at the University of Illinois.