Assistant Professor JooYoung Seo has been awarded a $649,921 Early Career Development grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, under the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program, which supports "developing a diverse workforce of librarians to better meet the changing learning and information needs of the American public by enhancing the training and professional development of librarians, developing faculty and library leaders, and recruiting and educating the next generation of librarians."

Assistant Professor Elizabeth Hoiem, Assistant Professor Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo, and Associate Professor Jodi Schneider are among the twenty faculty from the University of Illinois System who were selected for the 2023-2024 cohort of the Public Voices Fellowship.

Associate Professors Yang Wang and Yun Huang are spearheading a project in collaboration with experts from the University of California-Berkeley and Stanford University to help ensure emerging artificial intelligence (AI) development proceeds in a democratic manner that is mindful of underserved groups. Informatics PhD student Tanusree Sharma is also leading this initiative as a critical component of her dissertation work.

The Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Institute (IHSI) at the University of Illinois has selected Associate Professors Halil Kilicoglu and Jodi Schneider for its new Emerging Research Leaders Academy. IHSI received over 50 nominations from department heads and directors associated with more than 35 units across campus. From those nominations, Kilicoglu and Schneider were among the fifteen participants chosen for the inaugural cohort.

PhD student Courtney Richardson has been selected as the winner of the 2023 Litwin Books Award for Ongoing Dissertation Research in the Philosophy of Information. The award, which consists of $1,000 and a certificate, is given annually to a graduate student who is working on a dissertation on the philosophy of information, broadly construed.

Members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing and Intelligence Lab, will present their research at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) 2023, which will be held from August 19-25 in Macao, S.A.R.

Associate Professor Maria Bonn, Senior Data and Policy Analyst Ben Schaap, and Teaching Assistant Professor Sharon Comstock have received a Provost's Initiative on Teaching Advancement (PITA) grant, worth $7,500, for their proposal, "Standardizing MSLIS Experiential Learning Opportunities." PITA grants support the implementation of teaching innovations and enhancements at the University of Illinois.

Sara L. Schwebel, professor and director of the Center for Children's Books, gave the opening keynote for the 26th biennial International Research Society for Children's Literature (IRSCL) 2023 Congress, which was held from August 12-16 in Santa Barbara, California. The theme of this year's conference, which attracted attendees from over thirty countries and six continents, was "Ecologies of Childhood: Children's Literature, Culture, and the Environment."

Associate Professor Dong Wang is the lead author of a book that introduces a new paradigm integrating edge computing, humans, and artificial intelligence (AI). Social Edge Computing: Empowering Human-Centric Edge Computing, Learning and Intelligence (Springer) is coauthored by Daniel "Yue" Zhang, research scientist at Amazon Alexa AI. 

PhD student Smit Desai received the Gary Mardsen Travel Award to present his research at the ACM conference on Conversational User Interfaces (CUI) 2023, which was held on July 19-21 in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. The award, worth $2,500, supported Desai’s travel expenses.