Faculty, staff, and students represented the iSchool at the Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC), held on October 1-4 in Orlando, Florida. Produced by AnitaB.org and presented in partnership with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), GHC is the world's largest gathering of women technologists.

Associate Professor and Interim Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Kate McDowell has authored a chapter in the book, Transforming Young Adult Services, Second edition, which was recently published by ALA Editions. In the new edition, leaders in the field present a diverse array of topics addressing current issues in teen libraries.

Associate Professor and PhD Program Director Jana Diesner has received a $200,000 grant from the Critical Infrastructure Resilience Institute (CIRI) for her project, "Reliable Extraction of Emergency Response Networks from Text Data and Bench-marking with National Emergency Response Guidelines." CIRI is a Center of Excellence of the Department of Homeland Security that aims to enhance the resiliency of the nation's critical infrastructures.

Director of the Center for Health Informatics and iSchool Research Scientist Ian Brooks gave an invited talk on health informatics at "Celebrating 25 Years of the Core Health Indicators," a side event held on September 30 during the 57th Session of the Pan-American H

PhD student Lo Lee will present work from Associate Professor Kyungwon Koh's research group at the Connected Learning Summit 2019, which will be held October 2-5 at the University of California, Irvine. The mission of the summit is to "fuel a growing movement of innovators harnessing emerging technology to expand access to participatory, playful, and creative learning." The program includes presentations and workshops ranging from speculative design, to game walkthroughs, sharing work in progress, and research panels.

A new informatics approach developed by Associate Professor Catherine Blake and Rebecca Kehm, a post-doctoral fellow at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, will assist physicians and researchers in their systematic review of medical literature. While previous automated methods to identify outcomes have extracted sentences, Blake and Kehm introduce a more precise method that extracts noun phrases rather than the entire sentence.

Associate Professor Yang Wang will present his research on inclusive privacy at Facebook's Digital Literacy & Transparency Design Jam on October 1 at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, California. Design Jams are interactive workshops organized and facilitated by the Trust, Transparency and Control (TTC) Labs, a cross-industry effort driven by Facebook that hosts research, insights, and prototype design patterns related to improving user experiences for privacy and data. Wang will join a global team of experts from Facebook's Accessibility Team and the TTC Labs in creating innovative designs focused on transparency and control for people with low tech literacy.y

Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker has appointed Dean Eunice E. Santos to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum Board of Directors. Santos was named dean of the School of Information Sciences in August. She previously served as the Ron Hochsprung Endowed Chair and Professor, and department chair of computer science, at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.

A project to support interdisciplinary game studies at the University of Illinois has received funding through the University's Investment for Growth initiative. Games @ Illinois: Playful Design for Transformative Education will support research and teaching at the dynamic intersection of play, immersive technologies, and interactive design. Participating units include the iSchool, Illinois Informatics Institute, College of Media, and College of Fine and Applied Arts.

Collecting and understanding data is important, but equally important is the ability to tell meaningful stories based on data. Students in the iSchool's Data Science Storytelling course (IS 590DST) learn data visualization as well as storytelling techniques, a combination that will prove valuable to their employers as they enter the workforce.