iSchool students, faculty, and staff presented their research at the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2022), which was held in a hybrid format on June 20-24.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Meicen Sun will join the faculty as an assistant professor in August 2023, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. Sun is a PhD candidate in political science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a research affiliate with the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. For the 2022-2023 academic year, she will be a postdoctoral scholar with the Program on Democracy and the Internet at Stanford University.

The old, green hand press that used to be stationed on the first floor of the iSchool building is getting a new lease on life. It has been moved to the Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab, where students and community members will be using it for letterpress printing. The Washington-style hand press, which was manufactured in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century by Reliance, was used for teaching and fine printing at the University of Illinois for decades before becoming a show piece at the iSchool.

Associate Professor Kate McDowell is the 2022 recipient of the Outstanding Information Science Teacher Award from the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T). The award recognizes her unique contributions to information science education that reside at the intersection of storytelling and data science.

Research on Diversity in Youth Literature (RDYL), a peer-reviewed, online, and open-access journal focused on issues of diversity, equity, social justice, inclusion, and intersectionality in youth literature, culture, and media, has moved from St. Catherine University to the iSchool's Center for Children's Books. The journal is co-edited by iSchool Associate Professor Sarah Park Dahlen and Sonia Alejandra Rodríguez, associate professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Haohan Wang will join the faculty as an assistant professor in August 2022, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. He recently completed his PhD in computer science through the Language Technologies Institute of Carnegie Mellon University.

Two projects led by iSchool faculty members have been selected as Humanities Research Institute (HRI) Research Clusters for 2022-2023. Formerly known as the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, HRI fosters interdisciplinary study in the humanities, arts, and social sciences at the University of Illinois. HRI Research Clusters enable faculty and graduate students to "develop questions or subjects of inquiry that require or would be enhanced by collaborative work." Projects selected as clusters receive grants of $2,500 to support their activities.

Ian Brooks, iSchool research scientist and director of the Center for Health Informatics (CHI), gave a keynote talk at the West Africa Conference on Digital Public Goods and Cybersecurity, which was held on May 9-10 in Freetown, Sierra Leone. The conference focused on bridging the gender gap in digital public goods and cybersecurity spaces in Africa.

Insider threats are one of the top security concerns facing large organizations. Current and former employees, business partners, contractors—anyone with the right level of access to a company’s data—can pose a threat. The incidence of insider threats has increased in recent years, at a significant cost to companies. Associate Professor Jingrui He is addressing this problem in a new project that seeks to detect and predict insider threats. She has been awarded a three-year, $200,000 grant from the C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute for her project, "Multi-Facet Rare Event Modeling of Adaptive Insider Threats."

There are approximately 600,000 individuals in the U.S. who are undergoing hemodialysis (HD) therapy for kidney failure. In hemodialysis, a machine filters wastes, salts, and fluid from the blood when an individual's kidneys are no longer healthy enough to do this work adequately. While lifestyle changes such as getting more exercise and making better nutritional choices would benefit HD patients, they are not popular with patients—leading to poor health outcomes. A new project, led by Assistant Professor Jessie Chin, aims to boost HD patients' commitment to exercise through a long-term motivational interviewing conversational agent (LotMintBot).