Associate Professor Yang Wang has received a one-year, $100,000 grant from Meta for his project, "Global South Citizens' Privacy Perceptions and Management of Targeted Ads on Social Media." His doctoral students Tanusree Sharma, Smirity Kaushik, and Yaman Yu will serve as co-investigators. The goal of the project is to learn from users in the Global South, with a focus on India and Bangladesh, about their experience with targeted ads.

Michael Torres, a senior from Chicago, has used the skills he gained from his iSchool courses in his internships and student organizations. Following his graduation this spring, he will work as an IT rotational analyst at the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago.

While traditional closed captions represent the spoken part of a video, important content may not be expressed, to the detriment of audiences who depend on captions to understand the material being presented. With the increasing reliance on videos in online learning, this becomes even more problematic. A new collaborative project being led by Assistant Professor Yun Huang will focus on explanatory captions, which give insight into a video's visual and audio content as well as the spoken word. Her project, "Advancing STEM Online Learning by Augmenting Accessibility with Explanatory Captions and AI," has received a three-year $526,006 grant (totaling $849,994 with two collaborators at Gallaudet University and University at Notre Dame) from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Bri Wisehart joined the iSchool on January 18 as a business administrative associate. In her new role, she will support the activities of the finance and human resources offices.

Assistant Professor JooYoung Seo has been selected as an Emerging Scholar by the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS), which is dedicated to the empirical investigation of learning in real-world settings and the use of technology-facilitated learning. Funded by the Wallace Foundation, the Emerging Scholars Program elevates and supports the work of scholars from marginalized and underrepresented groups whose research focuses on "addressing educational injustices through the research methodologies and/or topics under study." 

Eight iSchool master's students were named 2021-2022 Spectrum Scholars by the American Library Association (ALA) Office for Diversity, Literacy, and Outreach Services. This "Spectrum Scholar Spotlight" series highlights the School's scholars. MS/LIS student Sheridan Cazarez earned his bachelor's degree in Spanish from California State University, Long Beach. He would like to make libraries more accessible and relevant to Latinxs and Spanish speakers through "targeted programming, multilingual collections, and the type of face-to-face service that engenders feelings of community and belonging."

After a few years in the workplace, it took a "leap of faith" for Callan Miranda to decide to return to school for an MS/LIS degree. A full-time employee at the Peoria Riverfront Museum, Miranda is happy with her choice to enroll in the iSchool's Leep (online) program and thankful to be the inaugural recipient of the Nancy and Dan Balz Scholarship. Nancy (BA LAS '70, MS/LIS '72) and her husband Dan (BS Media '68, MS Media '72) established the scholarship to help make education more affordable for returning students like Miranda.

When he was a student, Dan Andree (MS/LIS '18) became involved in the School's mentoring program for the chance to have a one-on-one exchange with a professional in his field of interest. He was matched with Marci Cohen (MS/LIS '00), assistant head of the music library at Boston University. In addition to speaking with his mentor over the phone, Andree had the opportunity to visit her place of work in Boston and get an idea of her day-to-day work.

The School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign seeks nominations for the 2021 Robert B. Downs Intellectual Freedom Award. The deadline for nominations is March 15, 2022. The award is cosponsored by SAGE Publishing.

When she isn't taking classes through the iSchool's Leep (online) program or working part time in the library at Hong Kong Academy, Lynn Lawrence-Brown is writing book reviews (including this review of a book by renowned children's poet Janet Wong) and blogging for We Need Diverse Books. Last month she completed a discussion guide for an upcoming middle-grade novel, The Not-So-Uniform Life of Holly-Mei by Christina Matula. Lawrence-Brown, a Taiwanese American who grew up in Maine but now lives in Hong Kong, wants to continue "doing work that helps promote diverse books and writers of color and help put diverse books in the hands of readers of all ages."