PhD student Linh Hoang presented her research with Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider at the AAAI 2019 Spring Symposium on Combining Machine Learning with Knowledge Engineering, which was held March 25-27 at Stanford University. 

Eighteen iSchool instructors were named in the University's List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent for Fall 2018. The rankings are released every semester, and results are based on the Instructor and Course Evaluation System (ICES) questionnaire forms maintained by Measurement and Evaluation in the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning. Only those instructors who gave out ICES forms during the semester and who released their data for publication are included in the list.

Associate Professor Victoria Stodden has been reappointed as a member of the Advisory Group for the National Academy of Engineering Online Ethics Center (OEC). OEC provides resources for understanding and addressing ethically significant issues in science and engineering, serving those who promote learning and advance the understanding of responsible research and practice.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Anita Say Chan has joined the faculty. She also holds a joint appointment with the College of Media, where she is an associate professor of communications in the Department of Media and Cinema Studies.

Professor and Associate Dean for Research J. Stephen Downie will be the keynote speaker for Digital Scholarship Symposium 2019, which will be held on March 19 at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). The theme of this year's symposium is "(Re-)Mining Text: From Traditional to Digital." Co-organized by the Hong Kong Literature Research Centre and CUHK Library, the event aims to explore techniques and applications of text mining in the era of digital scholarship.

Associate Professor Maria Bonn will discuss Publishing Without Walls (PWW) at the National Federation of Advanced Information Science (NFAIS) 2019 Humanities Roundtable, which will be held on March 10 in Washington, D.C. The topic of this year's program is "Evaluation of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities and Its Impact." It will address the skills, tools, and resources required for digital humanities evaluation as well as how publishers, libraries, and content aggregators can better support digital humanities.

Through the Frankel Scholars internship program, students enrolled in University of Illinois Laboratory High School are able to collaborate with iSchool faculty mentors on various research projects. This year's inaugural program, managed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), includes 16 students who complete internships led by an NCSA staff member or an NCSA faculty affiliate from other units on campus, including the iSchool.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Nigel Bosch has joined the faculty. He also holds a joint appointment with the Department of Educational Psychology in the College of Education.

Professor and Executive Associate Dean Linda C. Smith (MS '72) has been named an Illinois Library Luminary by the Illinois Library Association (ILA). This distinction honors individuals whose efforts have made a significant contribution to Illinois libraries. Smith's nearly 50-year career began when she came to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Graduate School of Library Science (now the School of Information Sciences) in 1971 shortly after graduating summa cum laude in physics and mathematics from Allegheny College (PA). She received her MS from Illinois in 1972 and spent a year at Washington University School of Medicine Library in St. Louis as a trainee in computer librarianship. She then earned an MS in information and computer science from Georgia Institute of Technology in 1975 and a PhD from Syracuse University, School of Information Studies in 1979. 

The University of Illinois is working with six other universities to streamline and improve access to books for students with disabilities who need an alternative to the print format. Part of a two-year effort funded by a $1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the project includes university libraries, disability resources offices and university presses, as well as the digital repositories HathiTrust, Internet Archive and Bookshare.