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. 

A new project led by a team of researchers from four universities aims to create and evaluate language models that represent past historical periods. The project, "Artificial Intelligence for Cultural and Historical Reasoning," was recently selected for a 2025 Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI) award from Schmidt Sciences. The $800,000 grant will be split among four institutions: Cornell University, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, The University of British Columbia, and McGill University. Professor Ted Underwood will serve as the principal investigator for the portion of the project at Illinois.

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. 

A new National Science Foundation (NSF) award will support an innovative effort in the School of Information Sciences to strengthen research security by using structured role-playing games (RPG) to model the threats facing academic research environments. The project, titled "REDTEAM: Research Environment Defense Through Expert Attack Modeling," addresses a growing challenge: balancing the open, collaborative nature of academic research with increasing national security risks and sophisticated adversarial threats. 

PhD candidate Xiaoliang Jiang successfully defended his dissertation, "Identifying Place Names in Scientific Writing Based on Language Models, Linked Data, and Metadata," on November 10. 

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. 

PhD candidate Jana M. Perkins successfully defended her dissertation, "Scholarship writ large: A data-rich analysis of professionalization in English literary scholarship from 1940 to the present."

PhD student Yaman Yu has been named a recipient of the 2025 Google PhD Fellowship in Privacy, Safety, and Security. The fellowship program recognizes outstanding graduate students who are conducting exceptional and innovative research in computer science and related fields, with a special focus on candidates who seek to influence the future of technology. Google PhD fellowships include tuition and fees, a stipend, and mentorship from a Google Research Mentor for up to two years. Google.org is providing over $10 million to support 255 PhD students across 35 countries and 12 research domains.

iSchool faculty and students will present their research at the 27th International Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group (SIG) ACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2025), which will be held in Denver, Colorado, October 26–29, 2025. This conference allows researchers to present their scholarship on design, evaluation, use, and education related to computing for people with disabilities and older adults.

School faculty, staff, and students will present their research at the 2025 Illinois Library Association (ILA) Annual Conference, which will be held on October 14–16 in Rosemont. The theme of this year's conference is "You Belong Here."