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. 

Professor Dong Wang and PhD student Ruichen Yao will present their research at the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) 2026, which will take place May 27–29 in Los Angeles, bringing together researchers from around the world to study the intersection of social media, society, and technology. The conference is widely recognized as a premier venue for computational social science and social computing, with a highly selective acceptance process.

The School of Information Sciences recognized student award recipients at the iSchool Convocation on May 17. Awards are based on academic achievements, as well as attributes that contribute to professional success. For more information about each award, including past recipients, visit the Student Awards page. Congratulations to this year's honorees! 

Mads Christiansen first heard about the growing presence of social services within libraries in one of their social work classes as an undergraduate.

PhD student Mubarak Raji has been invited to join the Working Expert Group on AI Governance Interoperability. This group operates under the United Nations Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies' new AI Governance for Humanity Lab. It supports the Secretary-General's High-level Advisory Body on AI by providing evidence-based analysis for the Global Dialogue on AI Governance, which will be held in July 2026 in Geneva, Switzerland.

PhD student Gladys Kemboi has been named a recipient of the Standing Conference of Eastern, Central and Southern African Library and Information Associations (SCECSAL) Excellence Awards 2026 in the category of Young LIS Professional. This is an international award recognizing excellence in library and information science in Africa.