iSchool faculty and students will present their research at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2026), which will be held from April 13–17 in Barcelona, Spain. The conference, considered the most prestigious in the field of Human-Computer Interaction, attracts researchers and practitioners from around the globe.

A new app developed by Associate Professor Yun Huang aims to make navigating conferences less work and more fun, so that attendees can meet others, discover fresh ideas, and "experience academic life as an exciting adventure." The app, PapersClaw.fun, will debut at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2026), which will be held from April 13-17 in Barcelona, Spain.

The following iSchool faculty and students will participate in iConference 2026, which will be held virtually from March 23–26 and physically from March 29–April 2 in Edinburgh, Scotland. The theme of this year's conference is "Information Literacies, Authenticity and Use: The Move Towards a Digitally Enlightened Society."

A paper co-authored by PhD student Muhammad Hassan and Associate Professor Masooda Bashir received the Distinguished Paper Award at the Workshop on Security and Privacy in Standardized IoT, which was held last month in San Diego, California, in conjunction with the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2026. 

This week, iSchool PhD students and faculty will present their research at the Technocracy Conference. Hosted by the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois on March 5–6, the conference will begin with a panel of graduate student papers and continue the following day with invited speakers and a keynote. All events will take place at the Levis Faculty Center on the Urbana campus. 

Professor and Associate Dean for Research Dong Wang and PhD student Ruohan Zong will present their research at the 19th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 26), which will be held from February 22–26 in Boise, Idaho. WSDM is a premier international conference in web search, data mining, and AI, known for its highly selective acceptance rates. This year, the acceptance rate for the main track of the conference was only 16 percent. 

PhD student Ebubechukwu Uba has been invited to present her work at the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) conference, Net Inclusion 2026, which will be held on February 3-5 in Chicago. Uba will discuss her digital inclusion work with StepUp Academy, a nonprofit education and digital inclusion initiative in Nigeria that she founded in 2023.

Professor Jingrui He's lab received an outstanding paper award at the Multi-Modal Reasoning for Agentic Intelligence Workshop, which was held during the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2025) last month in Honolulu, Hawaii. 

Informatics PhD student Sepehr Vaez Afshar has been named a Student Scholar by The Association for Preservation Technology International (APT). Each year, around ten students are selected worldwide for the scholarship program based on the quality and innovation of their research abstracts, as well as their contribution to the field of preservation technology. Scholars are paired with mentors from the APT College of Fellows, prepare and present their research during the association's annual conference, and enjoy opportunities for long-term professional networking and mentorship within the preservation community.

iSchool faculty, staff, and students will participate in the 88th Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T), which will be held on November 14-18 in Arlington, Virginia. ASIS&T will also host a Virtual Satellite Meeting on December 11-12.