MSLIS student Rasheed Adigun has been awarded the 2026 Helen Knoll Jira Scholarship from the Health Science Librarians of Illinois (HSLI). The award supports individuals pursuing education in library or information science in Illinois, especially those focusing on health science librarianship.

MSLIS student Sydney Durst spent the summer of 2026 interning with the Anchorage Museum. "I found myself really pulling from my lessons in my metadata classes," she said. "A big part of the task was identifying what information was important to put in searchable descriptions for researchers!"

Six master's students have been named 2026 Spectrum Scholars by the American Library Association (ALA) Office for Diversity, Literacy, and Outreach Services. The Spectrum Scholarships were established in 1997, and this year, the program received four times as many applications as there were available scholarships.

Informatics PhD student Robbie Sieczkowski's project, "The mv lab spatial trainer," is a mixed-reality app designed to help users learn and practice foundational concepts in Laban-Bartenieff Movement Analysis (LBMA).

Join the iSchool at the American Library Association (ALA) 2026 Annual Conference and Exhibition on June 25–29 in Chicago, Illinois.

Students in the Business Intelligence Group (BIG)—the experiential learning consultancy program affiliated with Associate Professor Yoo-Seong Song's Applied Business Research courses (IS 494 and IS 514)—spent the spring semester working directly with organizations across industries, including health care, financial services, aviation, gaming, community services, and higher education. 

PhD student Wei Cao and Assistant Professor Yaoyao Liu received a Best Paper Award at the 4th Workshop on Generative Models for Computer Vision, which was held during the 2026 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR). 

A paper from Professor Dong Wang's Social Sensing & Intelligence Lab received the Best Dataset Paper Award at the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) held in May 2026 in Los Angeles, California. According to Wang, the paper was accepted in the first review round, which had an acceptance rate of 4.7 percent (14 of 298 submissions). 

Associate Professor Rachel Adler and Informatics PhD student Olive Wang will present their work at the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education Conference on Research on Equity and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology (RESPECT), which will be held in Chicago this week.

PhD students Ramazan Yener, Eryue Xu, and Mubarak Raji presented their research this week at the 2026 USENIX Conference on Privacy Engineering Practice and Respect (PEPR) in Santa Clara, California. PEPR is focused on designing and building products and systems with privacy and respect for their users and the societies in which they operate. The students received USENIX grants covering their conference registration and providing travel support to attend the conference.