PhD student Yingjun Guan will present his research at the Conference on Statistical Learning and Data Science / Nonparametric Statistics, which will be held June 4-6 at Columbia University. The conference brings together researchers in statistical machine learning and data mining from academia, industry, and government to discuss topics such as big data analytics, classification, learning theory, network analysis, and signal and image processing.

Associate Professor Carol Tilley will participate in a panel discussion at the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo (CAKE) this weekend. A celebration of independent comics, CAKE features workshops, exhibitions, and panel discussions as well as comics for sale.

Doctoral candidate Steve Witt successfully defended his dissertation, "Making Internationalism Conscious: Libraries and the Transnational Struggle for Global Order (1911-1951)," on May 30. 

Assistant Professor and MS/LIS Program Director Nicole A. Cooke will be a keynote speaker at two upcoming conferences: the New Jersey Library Association (NJLA) Annual Conference, which will be held May 30-June 1 in Atlantic City, and Libraries in the Digital Age (LIDA) 2018, which will be held June 13-15 at the University of Zadar in Croatia.

In "Fake News and Alternative Facts: Information Literacy in a Post-Truth Era," a new American Library Association (ALA) Editions Special Report, Assistant Professor and MS/LIS Program Director Nicole A. Cooke argues that the current situation represents a golden opportunity for librarians to impart these important skills to patrons, regardless of their age or experience.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Karen Wickett (MS '07, PhD '12) will join the faculty in August 2018. She is currently an assistant professor in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin.

Doctoral candidate Dianah T. Kacunguzi will present her research at the 10th Quantitative and Qualitative Methods in in Libraries International Conference (QQML 2018), which will be held on May 22-25 in Chania, Greece.

Catherine Blake, associate professor and associate director of the iSchool's Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship, will give a presentation at the Carle Cancer Center in Urbana on May 18. She will give the talk, "Learning Health Systems that Leverage Informatics and Communities of Practice."

During the 2018 Python Education Summit, held in conjunction with the PyCon 2018 conference, Lecturer Elizabeth Wickes will discuss how to help new Python learners be successful. PyCon, an annual gathering for the community using and developing the open-source Python programming language, will be held May 9-17 in Cleveland.

The iSchool is proud to announce the promotion of three faculty to associate professor with indefinite tenure: Assistant Professor and MS/LIS Program Director Nicole A. Cooke, Assistant Professor and PhD Program Director Jana Diesner, and Assistant Professor Emily Knox. Their new appointments will be effective August 16, 2018, pending final approval by the Board of Trustees.