Catherine Blake has been promoted to the position of professor in the School of Information Sciences, effective August 16, 2021. Blake's research seeks to accelerate science and inform policy by automatically extracting and summarizing claims reported in the scientific literature.

Cyber risk is everywhere, so cyber defense abilities are naturally in high demand from employers. However, there aren't nearly enough job candidates available who have both the technical skills and the broader contextual understanding that today's cybersecurity positions require. Developing a stronger cybersecurity workforce has therefore become a national priority, and experts are looking for ways to get more students interested in this vitally important but often-misunderstood field.

The iSchool has surpassed its $20 million goal for the "With Illinois" campaign, the Urbana campus' most ambitious fundraising effort to date. Gifts toward "With Illinois" will continue until June 30, 2022. The School's priorities for the campaign are to offer an accessible education, enrich the student experience, and provide faculty support.

Yosra Abdulwahid, a junior from Oak Forest, Illinois, is sharing her enthusiasm for her School through her service as an iSchool ambassador. She has had the opportunity to present to high school students about the BS in information sciences, participate in a student course showcase event, and attend the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference.

Kelly Czarnecki (MS/LIS ’02) is the 2021-2022 president of the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), a division of the American Library Association. She is excited about YALSA's new strategic plan, which is based on member needs and feedback. Czarnecki describes the plan as "a fresh start we can rally around that will make YALSA an even stronger organization!" She also is looking forward to serving as an alumni panelist at the iSchool’s Fall 2021 Virtual Open House on September 3.

A paper authored by PhD student Smirity Kaushik and Associate Professor Yang Wang received the IAPP SOUPS Privacy Award at the 17th Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2021). The symposium, which was held August 8-10, brings together an interdisciplinary group of researchers and practitioners in human-computer interaction, security, and privacy.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that five of the eighteen students selected to participate in the 2021-2023 Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Kaleidoscope Diversity Scholars Program are from the University of Illinois. With the goal of attracting MS/LIS students from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups to careers in research libraries and archives, the Kaleidoscope Program offers financial support to scholars as well as leadership development through the ARL Annual Leadership Symposium, a formal mentoring program, career placement assistance, and a site visit to an ARL member library.

A paper by Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu and Informatics PhD students Haoyang Liu and Janina Sarol received the Best System Paper Award at the 15th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2021). SemEval, which was held on August 5-6, is a series of natural language processing (NLP) research workshops whose mission is "to advance the current state of the art in semantic analysis and to help create high-quality annotated datasets in a range of increasingly challenging problems in natural language semantics."

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois offers a variety of summer programs that provide undergraduates with the opportunity to address fundamental challenges in high-performance computing, data analysis, visualization, cybersecurity, and other areas of interest. This summer, interns participated and contributed to various interdisciplinary projects at NCSA involving high-performance computing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. BS/IS student Shriya Srikanth participated in the NCSA's Students Pushing INnovation (SPIN) program.

Denzel Goodloe has joined the iSchool as assistant director for MS/IM and MS/BIO advising. In this role, he provides academic advising for students enrolled in the MS in information management (MS/IM) and MS in bioinformatics programs.