iSchool Affiliate Professor Clara M. Chu, director of the Mortenson Center for International Library Programs and Mortenson Distinguished Professor at the University of Illinois, along with collaborators from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and the University of Texas at Austin, have received a Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The $208,142 grant will fund the IDEA (Innovation, Disruption, Enquiry, Access) Institute on Artificial intelligence (AI).

The Department of Homeland Security has awarded Associate Professor Jingrui He a two-year, $319,568 grant to study how the risk of foreign influence on news media can be mitigated. Her project, "Towards a Computational Framework for Disinformation Trinity: Heterogeneity, Generation, and Explanation," will lead to a new suite of algorithms and software tools to detect, predict, generate, and understand disinformation dissemination. Hanghang Tong, associate professor of computer science at Illinois, will serve as co-principal investigator.

A paper authored by Informatics PhD student Donald Keefer and Assistant Professor Karen Wickett, "Adapting Research Process Models for the Design of Knowledge Engineering Applications," has received the Best Short Paper Award at the 2020 Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) Annual Meeting.

When retracted papers are cited both before and after retraction, the scientific publication network inadvertently propagates potentially faked data, fundamental errors, and unreproducible results. Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider is working on reducing the spread of retracted science, receiving a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for this research.

iSchool faculty presented their research at the Digital Humanities Initiative at the University of Illinois Chicago conference, "Resources and Visibility in Digital Humanities," which was held virtually on October 22-23. A collaborative effort between UIC’s Institute for the Humanities and University Library, the Digital Humanities Initiative provides technical resources for humanities scholars at UIC. Sara L. Schwebel, professor and director of The Center for Children's Books, was a keynote speaker for the conference, and Teaching Associate Professors David Dubin and Judith Pintar served on the panel, Gaming and Transmediation.

iSchool faculty and students will participate in the 83rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T), which will be held virtually from October 22-November 1. The theme of this year's conference is "Information for a Sustainable World: Addressing Society's Grand Challenges." The meeting is the premier international conference dedicated to the study of information, people, and technology in contemporary society.

A poster coauthored by Assistant Professor Melissa Ocepek, PhD student Lo Lee, and Stephann Makri, senior lecturer at City, University of London, has been selected to receive the SIG USE Best Information Behavior Conference Poster Award at the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) Annual Meeting, which will be held virtually from October 22-November 1. The award recognizes the best poster within the scope of information behavior, "broadly defined to include how people construct, need, seek, manage, give, and use information in different contexts."

Anita Say Chan, associate professor in the iSchool and the Department of Media and Cinema Studies, will present her research at the 23rd ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2020), to be held virtually on October 17-21. CSCW is the premier venue for experts from industry and academia to explore the technical, social, material, and theoretical challenges of designing technology to support collaborative work and life activities.

Associate Professor and Interim Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Emily Knox has been selected to participate in the 2020-2021 Building Pathways for Emerging Leaders Fellows program at the University of Illinois. Twelve professors were selected for the year-long leadership development program, which is designed for faculty members at the associate professor and full professor rank who demonstrate leadership potential in their current role.

Associate Professor Yang Wang presented his research at the 64th International Annual Meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES), a virtual event held from October 5-9.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Assistant Professor Nigel Bosch a three-year, $987,015 grant to study potential bias in adaptive learning software through his project, "Collaborative Research: Exploring Algorithmic Fairness and Potential Bias in K-12 Mathematics Adaptive Learning." Bosch will observe and interview students using adaptive math learning software to discover what aspects of their identity are most salient in the adaptive learning context and then investigate possible algorithmic biases related to the identities that students express. Steven Ritter, founder and chief scientist at Carnegie Learning, will serve as co-principal investigator on the project, which also includes researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Illinois College of Education.

Assistant Professor Jessie Chin and PhD student Smit Desai will present their research at the 64th International Annual Meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES), a virtual event held from October 5-9. The mission of HFES is "to advance the science and practice of designing for people in systems through knowledge exchange, collaboration, and advocacy."

Assistant Professor Elizabeth Hoiem has published a paper, "The Progress of Sugar: Consumption as Complicity in Children's Books about Slavery and Manufacturing, 1790-2015," in Children's Literature in Education (CLE). In her paper, Hoiem analyzes "production stories," a genre of books and media that teaches how everyday things are made. Since they started in the eighteenth century, children's production stories have evolved from picturebooks to TV episodes and web video series. Hoiem focuses on stories of sugar production in her paper and accompanying web resource, Production Stories.

Assistant Professor Melissa Ocepek and PhD student Jamillah Gabriel will present their research at the Information Behaviour Conference (ISIC 2020), a virtual event held from September 28-October 2. This conference is devoted to information-seeking behavior and information use, focusing this year on analytical investigations of the connection between information research and information behavior and practices.

Fifteen iSchool instructors were named in the University's List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent for Summer 2020. The rankings are released every semester, and results are based on the Instructor and Course Evaluation System (ICES) questionnaire forms maintained by Measurement and Evaluation in the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning.

With Hurricane Sally threatening the Gulf Coast last week, people in its path may have felt reassured by the mobile apps that would provide them with weather alerts or notify first responders in case of an emergency. While the app users may have been willing to share their location with first responders, they might be surprised to learn that their location and other personal information could be shared with a third party or accessed after the hurricane had passed. Assistant Professor Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo and fellow researchers examine the privacy practices of popular disaster apps in the paper, "Disaster Privacy/Privacy Disaster," which was the lead article in a special issue of the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (vol. 71, issue 9)  on information privacy in the digital age.

Associate Professor Masooda Bashir has received a $150,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS LG-246404-OLS-20) for her project, "Securing our Public Libraries: A Forum on Privacy and Security." The project seeks to identify the existence and absence of privacy protecting technologies (software and/or hardware) in public library systems.

Senior Lecturer Sharon Comstock has been named to the first roster for the Public Library Data Alliance (PLDA) by the Chief Officers of State Library Agencies (COSLA) and the National Information Standards Organization (NISO). Representing an array of stakeholders, this group will continue the work of the COSLA's Measures that Matter initiative.

The National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes program awarded $20 million to the Center for Digital Agriculture at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) for the new Artificial Intelligence for Future Agricultural Resilience, Management, and Sustainability (AIFARMS) Institute. The program, a joint effort between the National Science Foundation (NSF) and U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture was created in response to the White House's 2019 update to the National Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Strategic Plan, which aims to provide support for AI research that focuses on impacting and improving society. iSchool Associate Professor Jingrui He is one of the researchers involved in the AIFARMS Institute.

Forty-one iSchool instructors were named in the University's List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent for Spring 2020. The rankings are released every semester, and results are based on the Instructor and Course Evaluation System (ICES) questionnaire forms maintained by Measurement and Evaluation in the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning. Only those instructors who gave out ICES forms during the semester and who released their data for publication are included in the list.