After more than forty years of dedicated service, Professor and Executive Associate Dean Linda C. Smith will retire from the School of Information Sciences at the end of June. A renowned leader in the LIS field, Smith is the recipient of numerous honors, including ALISE awards for her teaching, service, and contributions to LIS education; the ASIS&T Award of Merit as well as Outstanding Information Science Teacher Award; recognition as a Fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science; the Beta Phi Mu Award for distinguished service to LIS education; and most recently, recognition as an Illinois Library Luminary.

Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider will present her medical informatics research at the 3rd European Conference on Argumentation (ECA 2019), which will take place on June 24-27 in Groningen, the Netherlands. The biennial conference attracts scholars on argumentation worldwide from various disciplines. The theme of ECA 2019 is "Reason to Dissent."

Associate Professor Victoria Stodden presented her research on reproducibility at the White House National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) Conference, "Building Bridges Across the S&T Enterprise," which was held on June 13-14 at the National Institutes for Health in Bethesda, Maryland. The conference brought together science and technology (S&T) leaders to share best practices and build collaboration across the Federal S&T enterprise.

The American Library Association (ALA) will hold its 2019 Annual Conference and Exhibition in Washington, D.C. on June 20-25. Visit with the iSchool at Booth #3205.

Associate Professor Terry L. Weech will discuss the accreditation of library and information studies (LIS) programs at the Conceptions of Library and Information Science (CoLIS) 10th international conference, which will take place on June 16-19 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The conference aims to provide a broad forum for the exploration of ideas in the field of LIS, information studies, and related disciplines.

Assistant Professor Nigel Bosch presented his research and served as a session chair at the ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization (UMAP), which was held June 9-12 in Larnaca, Cyprus. UMAP is an international conference for researchers and practitioners working on systems that adapt to individual users and groups of users and that collect, represent, and model user information. The theme of this year's conference was "Making Personalization Transparent: Giving Control Back to the User."

Affiliate Professor Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe has been elected as a member of the board of directors for the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP).

Professor Bertram Ludäscher will be presenting research with group members during Philadelphia Logic Week 2019. The event, which will be held from June 3-7 at St. Joseph's University, brings together several conferences dedicated to the research on logic, knowledge representation, reasoning, transformations and provenance.

Associate Professor and BS/IS Program Director Emily Knox has published a paper, "Silencing Stories: Challenges to Diverse Books," in The International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion (IJIDI). According to Knox, over the past few years, there have been an increasing number of diverse books on the Most Challenged Books List from the American Library Association (ALA) Office for Intellectual Freedom. Her latest work expands on a previous discourse analysis of censorship on challenges to diverse books through more robust analysis of the challenge cases.

Conservation organizations and foundations have invested billions to preserve natural resources and biodiversity across the globe, but the effectiveness of these investments over time is not always clear. A new multi-institutional project, led by a University of Illinois researcher and supported by a $550,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, will trace key outcomes of $655 million in the foundation's global conservation investments made over 40 years.