Assistant Professor Jana Diesner will moderate a panel on Natural Language Processing (NLP) at the Big Data Summit on November 10 in Champaign. The annual summit brings together experts from the University of Illinois Research Park, industry, and academia to share knowledge about big data and its business applications.

Associate Professor Bonnie Mak has been invited to share her expertise at a National Science Foundation (NSF) workshop on "Social Facets of Data Science." The workshop will examine data science as an important and growing profession that sits at the intersection of the STEM fields and the liberal and creative arts. 

Associate Professor Kathryn La Barre has been invited by the Knowledge Organization Research Group (KOrg) to work with doctoral students and faculty in the School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

The iSchool is pleased to announce the appointment of Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe (MS ’94) as editor of its quarterly journal Library Trends. Hinchliffe will begin her new role on January 1, 2017. A leader in the field of library and information science, Hinchliffe is professor and coordinator for Information Literacy Services and Instruction in the University Library

At the end of October, Professor Emeritus Dan Schiller delivered a series of lectures in China focusing on the theme, "Networks and Age of Nixon." Schiller was invited to talk as part of Peking University's Global Fellowship Program. Prior lecturers in the Global Fellowship Program include Fredric Jameson and Francis Fukuyama and, going back to its earliest years, John Dewey.

A new book by Sidney Berger (MS '87) offers readers a definitive glossary for understanding how books are made and how they are described in the bookselling, book collecting, and library worlds. The Dictionary of the Book: A Glossary for Book Collectors, Booksellers, Librarians and Others (published by Rowman & Littlefield) was released this month.

Allen Renear, professor and dean of the iSchool, will deliver a keynote at the 7th Asia-Pacific Conference on Library & Information Education and Practice (A-LIEP), which will be held on November 3-4 in Nanjing, China. In the talk, “Data Science and the Information Professional,” he will discuss the ethical and social obligations of information professionals from the perspective of data science.

Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe (MS '94), iSchool affiliated faculty member, will be a keynote speaker at the Library Assessment Conference, to be held October 31-November 2 in Arlington, Virginia. 

Associate Professor Carol Tilley will present "Dear Sirs: I Believe You're Wasting Your Time" at the National Archives on October 27. The title of her talk, which is sponsored by the Center for Legislative Archives, refers to Senate hearings in the 1950s that investigated the link between comics and juvenile delinquency.

Associate Professor Bonnie Mak will return to The Pennsylvania State University to participate in the inaugural Information + Humanities conference on October 28-29.