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.

Doctoral candidate Jessica Cheng successfully defended her dissertation, "Agreeing to Disagree: Applying a Logic-based Approach to Reconciling and Merging Multiple Taxonomies," on May 25. 

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."

At the Urbana City Council meeting on May 9, students in the Community Data (IS 594) course presented their research on how communities are reducing gun violence. According to their instructor Chamee Yang, postdoctoral research associate with the iSchool, Community Data Clinic, and Just Infrastructures Initiative, the new course was designed as an experiential learning opportunity with a community engagement component, where students could gain research experience with real-world implications. Throughout the Spring 2022 semester, students worked in groups to explore community-driven approaches to prevent gun violence.

Doctoral candidate Ly Dinh successfully defended her dissertation, "Advances to Network Analysis Theories and Methods for the Understanding of Formal and Emergent Structures in Interpersonal, Corporate/Organizational, and Hazards Response Setting," on May 19.

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).

BS/IS student Luke Emano has been selected as a recipient of a Research Support Grant for his project, "Time is Value: Exploring the Barriers of Scalability for Timebanks." The award, worth $1,000, is sponsored by the Office of Undergraduate Research.

iSchool faculty and students will present their research at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2022), which is structured as a hybrid-onsite conference from May 2-5 in New Orleans, Louisiana. The annual conference brings together researchers and practitioners who have the overarching goal of making the world a better place with interactive digital technologies.

For MS/LIS student Ben Ostermeier, the digital exhibit he curated for the U of I Rare Book and Manuscript Library (RBML), "Starkiller to Skywalker: How Star Wars Evolved from Script to Screen," was a labor of love. A Star Wars fan, Ostermeier spent ten months curating the exhibit, although background work on the exhibit actually started earlier, as a project for one of his MS/LIS courses.