Members of Associate Professor Dong Wang's research group, the Social Sensing Lab, presented their research at the 31st International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 25th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-ECAI 2022). The conference, which brings together AI researchers from around the world, was held in Vienna, Austria, from July 23-29.
Members of Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu's research lab won third prize, valued at $20,000, in the LitCoin Natural Language Processing (NLP) Challenge. The challenge, which was sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), brought together government, medical research communities, and data scientists to create data-driven knowledge graphs that consolidate scientific literature knowledge across domains.
Assistant Professor Melissa Ocepek and Assistant Professor Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo have built and currently lead an interdisciplinary, collaborative group of researchers at the intersection of everyday information, knowledge governance, and misinformation to address how people experience, produce, and manage misinformation in their everyday lives.
Assistant Professor JooYoung Seo has been awarded a $54,000 grant from RStudio, PBC to make its open-source scientific and technical publishing system Quarto more accessible. For his project, "Improving Accessible Reproducibility for Data Science Publishing System," he will collaborate with RStudio, PBC to develop and improve accessibility components of Quarto for people with and without dis/abilities.
The Illinois Summer Research Symposium, which will be held on July 21-22 at the I-Hotel and Conference Center, will feature the research of iSchool students. Sponsored by the Graduate College, this symposium showcases equity and diversity programs at the University of Illinois and the exceptional research talents of the next generation of scholars. This year's conference is the culmination of two longstanding Graduate College programs, the Summer Predoctoral Institute (SPI) and Summer Research Opportunities Program for Undergraduates (SROP), and nine partner programs.
This summer, MS/LIS student Loida Pan is serving as an intern with the Network of the National Library of Medicine (NNLM) National Center for Data Services (NCDS). She is one of eight students who were selected to participate in the competitive internship program, which launched in 2022. During her work on the NNLM Evaluation Center (NEC) Data Warehouse project, she will be learning how to build and use relational databases, hone her programming language skills, and retrieve data from application programming interfaces.
iSchool faculty and students will present their research at the 8th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2), which will be held in Chicago on July 19-22. IC2S2 brings together academic researchers, industry experts, open data activists, and government agency workers to explore challenges, methods, and research questions in the field of computational social science.
A paper coauthored by PhD student Ziwei Wu and Associate Professor Jingrui He received the distinguished paper award during the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT). The interdisciplinary conference, which was held on June 21-24 in Seoul, South Korea, brings together a diverse community of scholars from computer science, law, social sciences, and humanities.
A research paper co-authored by Associate Professor Kyungwon Koh; Xun Ge, professor of learning sciences at the University of Oklahoma; and iSchool doctoral candidate Julia Burns Petrella has received a 2022 American Association of School Librarians (AASL) Research Grant by the Educators of School Librarians Section of AASL. Sponsored by ABC-CLIO, these grants recognize "excellence in manuscripts addressing a persistent and recurring challenge in the field of school librarianship." The awarded paper, "Librarian-Teacher Co-Teaching and the Role of School Librarians in Facilitating Inquiry and Maker Learning," was recently published in School Library Research. Recipients will present their papers in October at the 2023 AASL National Conference in Tampa, Florida.
A new guide to children's literature includes a chapter on censorship by Emily Knox, associate professor and director of graduate programs. A Companion to Children's Literature, co-edited by Deborah Stevenson, former director of the iSchool's Center for Children's Books and former editor of The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, was recently published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
