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.

Earlier this month, the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a committee report examining computational reproducibility and replicability in science, with the goals of improving research rigor and transparency. The congressionally mandated report was authored by an ad hoc committee of national experts, including iSchool Associate Professor Victoria Stodden.

With support from the National Humanities Center, Professor Ted Underwood is examining patterns of human perspective throughout two centuries of literary history. The Center is a residential institute for advanced study in art history, classics, languages and literature, philosophy, and other fields of the humanities. In addition to pursuing their own research and writing at the Center, fellows form seminars and study groups with cohorts holding shared research interests.

The iSchool is pleased to announce the appointment of new directors for its master's degree programs. Associate Professor Maria Bonn will serve as program director for the MS in library and information science (MS/LIS), and Associate Professor Catherine Blake will serve as program director for the MS in information management (MS/IM). They will begin their three-year terms on May 16.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Jingrui He will join the faculty as an associate professor in August 2019. She is currently an associate professor of computer science and engineering at Arizona State University (ASU).

Associate Professor Victoria Stodden has been selected to serve on the Reproducibility Badging and Definitions Working Group for the National Information Standards Organization (NISO). NISO is a U.S. nonprofit association that develops, maintains, and publishes technical standards to facilitate the creation, management, and interchange of information so that it can be trusted for use in research and teaching.