Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu and PhD student Linh Hoang will present their research at the AMIA (American Medical Informatics Association) Annual Symposium, which will be held virtually from November 14-18. The symposium showcases the latest innovations from the community of biomedical informatics researchers and practitioners.

Professor Emeritus Boyd Rayward was recently interviewed in Mons, Belgium, at a meeting of scholars involved in the HyperOtlet research project. This multi and transdisciplinary project is focused on Le Traité de documentation, a major book in the history of information sciences that was written in 1934 by Paul Otlet, a Belgian lawyer, bibliographer, internationalist, and pacifist whose ideas foreshadowed current digital and other technologies such as the Internet, hypertext, and Wikipedia.

Assistant Professor Melissa Ocepek and William Aspray, senior research fellow at the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, have co-edited a new book, Deciding Where to Live: Information Studies on Where to Live in America, which was recently published by Rowman & Littlefield. Their book explores major themes related to where to live in America and shows how "changes in media and information technology are shaping both our housing choices and our understanding of the meaning of personal place."

Associate Professor Jana Diesner will present her research on biases in data science at the Big Data Summit, which will be held virtually on November 12. 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 through panel discussions, keynote presentations, and networking opportunities. This year's summit will include sessions on machine learning, artificial intelligence, and digital transformation.

MS/IM student Jinal Mehta credits her iSchool experience with helping her develop the skills she needed for a successful internship with ROKMETRO, creator of the Safer Illinois app. Safer Illinois, the official COVID-19 app for the University of Illinois, provides pandemic resources to support community health and safety. Mehta found out about the internship at ROKMETRO, a startup at the University of Illinois Research Park, through her involvement in Illinois Business Consulting.

Sarah Park Dahlen (MS '09, PhD '09), iSchool research fellow and associate professor in the Master of Library and Information Science Program at St. Catherine University, will deliver the 2020 Gryphon Lecture on November 12. Sponsored annually by The Center for Children's Books (CCB), the lecture features a leading scholar in the field of youth and literature, media, and culture.

A paper coauthored by Assistant Professor Yun Huang and PhD student Si Chen received an Honorable Mention Award at the 23rd ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2020), which was held virtually on October 17-21. Approximately 1,000 papers were eligible for consideration for Best Paper awards, with the top one percent recognized as Best Papers and five percent as Honorable Mentions. Coauthors included Xinyue Chen, an undergraduate at Peking University, and Xu Wang, a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University.

Doctoral candidate DeAnza Williams successfully defended her dissertation, "BlackBoyYALit: Seeing Black Boys in 21st Century Young Adult Literature," on November 5.

Shannon O'Rourke Kasali's involvement with libraries started before she arrived at Illinois for her MS/LIS degree. While working in the Democratic Republic of Congo, she witnessed the lack of accessibility to books. In response, O'Rourke Kasali crowd-funded $27,000 to purchase 27,000 books, leading to the creation of Books for Congo. Since 2016, the organization has established 16 libraries in two provinces in the country, distributing over 56,000 books and training 30 librarians.

Teaching Associate Professor Judith Pintar has been selected to serve as project manager for the third and final year of Training in Digital Methods for Humanists (TDMH), a pilot program run by the Humanities Research Institute (HRI). The goal of the program, which is funded by the Investment for Growth Initiative of the Provost and the Vice Chancellor for Research, is to help humanities faculty acquire the digital tools, computational methods, and technological expertise they need for their teaching and research.