iSchool faculty, staff, and students will present their research in transparent data curation and cleaning, provenance management, certified transparency, and data ethics at the 18th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC24), which will be held from February 19-21 in Edinburgh, Scotland. The theme of this year's conference, which brings together individuals, organizations, and institutions across all disciplines and domains involved in curating data, is "Trust Through Transparency."

Associate Professor Rachel Adler and Teaching Assistant Professor Jill Naiman have been selected for the 2024 National Institutes of Health (NIH) Grant Writing Series program in the Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Institute (IHSI). Led by faculty who have demonstrated a history of success with NIH proposals, the biennial NIH Grant Writing Series is designed to prepare Illinois faculty to submit their first R01 or other individual investigator proposals to the NIH.

Assistant Professor Meicen Sun was selected as a 2024 Pacific Telecommunications Council (PTC) Emerging Scholar and presented her research at the PTC Annual Conference, which was held from January 21-24 in Honolulu, Hawaii. PTC is a global, nonprofit organization promoting the advancement of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the Pacific Rim. 

Associate Professor Kate McDowell will deliver two keynotes on library data storytelling this month. 

Professor Jingrui He has been awarded a two-year, $600,000 grant from the IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute to improve modeling climate change and its impact across multiple application domains. He and a team of researchers from the University of Illinois and IBM will build Climate Runtime, a computational framework integrating cutting-edge capabilities from climate foundation models and multimodal fusion. This framework will allow for accurate prediction and quantification of weather and climate events and their impact in areas such as finance and agriculture.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to learn how to recognize online deceptions and prevent the spread of elder fraud. That, in a nutshell, is the idea behind Deepcover, a free new app available for download on Apple's App Store and Google Play that aims to equip older adults with the skills they need to safely navigate the increasingly complex digital world we inhabit.

A new study by PhD student Kyrie Zhixuan Zhou and Assistant Professor Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo has uncovered the existence of gender bias in Large Language Models (LLMs) in the U.S. and China. The researchers examined public discussion about this topic on the social media platforms Twitter (now X) and Weibo, finding reports of gender bias in the LLMs ChatGPT and Ernie, China's ChatGPT-equivalent.

Assistant Professor Travis Wagner is collaborating on a project that explores how library and information science research and medical library partnerships can inform lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and asexual (LGBTQIA+) community health workers. The research aims to address the problem of health disparities among LGBTQIA+ populations. 

A new guide to children's literature and culture includes a chapter by doctoral candidate Andrew Zalot. The Routledge Companion to Children's Literature and Culture, edited by Claudia Nelson, Elisabeth Wesseling, and Andrea Me-Ying Wu, was released at the end of November.

iSchool faculty, staff, and students will present their research at the 37^th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023), which will be held from December 10-16 in New Orleans, Louisiana. NeurIPS is one of the most prestigious and competitive international conferences in machine learning and computational neuroscience.